Ruth Thorne-Thomsen at the Museum of Photographic Arts - San Diego, California - Review of Exhibitions

"Within This Garden: Photographs by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen" is a touring retrospective that covers the major stages in this 50-year-old photographer's career from 1976 to 1991. Thorne-Thomsen's work blends images from many places and periods, borrowing from such artists as Durer, Magritte, O'Keeffe and Lartigue as well as from movies and old picture books. At their best, her photographic narratives transcend pastiche by appealing both to collective history and private memory.

One-third of the 92 works in this show are small sepia-toned pictures, taken with a pinhole camera, from "Expeditions" (1976-84), her first and most extensive body of work. In this series Thorne-Thomsen pointedly imitates photographs of archeological discoveries made in the mid-1800s. Head With Ladders, Illinois (1979) depicts, with blurry imprecision, what seems to be a massive stone head moored on some exotic stretch of desert. The head is actually a small paper cutout that Thorne-Thomsen stuck in the sand on the shore of Lake Michigan. The deception is possible because of the way the pinhole camera distorts perspective and scale. ThorneThomsen's use of elaborate miniature tableaux points to a rich and ambiguous interior landscape, where the way things are perceived is more important than what is being represented.

In "Views from the Shoreline" (1986-87), Thorne-Thomsen continues to work with heads, this time superimposing silhouetted female profiles upon rocky, barren landscapes. In contrast to the exterior terrain, the photographic images that the artist places inside the silhouettes show flowers, waterfalls, rivers, pebbles and sky--Edenic scenes of harmony and peacefulness, and clear metaphors for the interior life of a woman. The image within the silhouette in Flora Belle, New Mexico (1987)is a lily, and the composition is an obvious homage to Georgia O'Keeffe.

The series "Messengers" (1989-90) represents a radical departure from ThorneThomsen's previous work. These 5-by-4-foot silver gelatin prints, elaborately framed in gilt, depict the faces of classical Greek statues that appear animated because Thorne-Thomsen pans the camera to blur the image. Mysterious, haunting and at times frightful, these luminous messengers are like shimmering reflections in a pool. Messenger #12, Italy (1989) is a close-up of the statue of Dionysus in the Boboli Gardens in Florence. As presented by Thorne-Thomsen, the statue's features convey a mixture of anguish and euphoria reminiscent of both 19thcentury Symbolist imagery and present-day fashion advertisements.

At times Thorne-Thomsen's too-blatant allusions to earlier artists detract from her own insights. More often though, she successfully transforms her sources and calls attention to changes in the way that images are perceived over time.

[This exhibition originated at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago and traveled to the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. It is scheduled to appear at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, in the summer of 1994 and at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass., in the fall.]

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