The elegant floor-to-ceiling butter-cream gallery of R. B. Stevenson is the setting for “Inter-Views: Paintings and Photographs,” an exceptionally challenging exhibition by brilliant young artist Carola Clift. She has mated silver gelatin prints together with abstract watercolor paintings on mat board, creating a new unit. Clift framed both units in synchronized white frames.
The intellectuality of this exhibit is significantly thought-provoking and challenging. For years, artists have painted from photographs, photographed paintings and tried to make paintings look like photographs and vice versa. Few have successfully conjoined the two as one.
“Printing of black-and-white negatives is like painting with silver, and that is the kind of attention I bring to the quality of each print that I make,” Clift explained. “It is composed of relative tonalities and many subtleties, and in those relationships are certain perimeters in which you have to work. The parameters might be black and white, or the availability of an assortment of papers that can yield a different effect and some really wonderful results.”
Clift will spend an entire day developing one good print, as her standards are very high. Also, once she completes a painting, that is it ” no fussing.
“My work is more about what happens among things than about things themselves,” she said. “In my experience, viewers tend to employ different modes of looking for different types of art.”
Presenting these paintings and photographs together in specific combinations not only allows them to play off each other, but also activates, in the viewer, multiple modes of looking at the same time. It is the artist’s intention to stimulate these kinds of interactions, thereby opening up greater possibilities of seeing which makes this exhibition an installation.
The artist doesn’t do the painting to go with the photograph.
“One of the things I’m interested in making these image combinations is that they are put together after the fact and they are very specific ” they have definite relationships to each other, even though the relationships are very rarely literal, but not often explicit,” she said.
Clift wants to prolong the act of looking on the part of the viewer because she primarily wants the viewer to identify the common dominator in the photo/painting and to see more than he or she would see if they were just a single item.
The Combination No. 9 is a triptych. There is a visual central core and structural angularity in each, including the aspect of light and its movement, which contributes something that attunes to each. This series was photographed in New York and La Jolla; it is the dynamic of what is going on and not the scene that provides the elements. There is an airiness of space to all three. It is more than a picture of the beach, but almost exactly the same shapes can be identified.
“When you give somebody something that is very obvious, like a picture of a tree, and the conclusion is satisfying to them, they will not look much further,” Clift said. “There are so many different layers and dimensions in my work that I am interested in prolonging that period of liking.”
Clift’s work doesn’t give people immediate answers.
Clift, 31, has been painting since she was a child. She is also a classical pianist and a law school graduate, and in 1995 decided to become a photographer. She bought her first real camera and worked at it completely untutored and undirected, without taking any photography classes.
Decidedly, this artist is one to watch in the years ahead, and this show is a fabulous opportunity to view her work in La Jolla.
“Inter-Views” closes April 15.
R.B. Stevenson Gallery, 7661 Girard Ave., Suite 201, is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Enter through the Divan Studio entrance and use the stairway to the second floor or ask for the elevator.
For information, call (858) 459-3917 or e-mail [email protected]. n