Kaucyila Brooke at Michael Dawson - Los Angeles - photography exhibition - Brief Article

Los Angeles artist Kaucyila Brooke is a storytelling conceptualist. In earlier work she delivered photomontages that rewrote the creation myth to suit a lesbian sensibility. The photographs in this exhibition recount loss and regrowth in nature and in the shifting habitats of human relationships.

Titled "Burned," the show was mainly a sequence of photographs, taken by Brooke with a 4-by-5 field camera over a period of 11 months, documenting the aftereffects of a lightning fire in a canyon in Los Angeles's Griffith Park. Fire, erosion and regeneration is the usual course of nature, and it's also the oldest tale in California. Yet the esthetic dedication to detail that Brooke brings to her subject matter, the almost filmic framing of the canyon's dailies, makes the usual seem lurid, tragic and, then, kind of unearthly.

An active stillness animates her work and the movement from image to image, the variations from deep to close within this suite, create a negotiated intimacy: but for this green branch grabbing the foreground, we might step right onto that grass. Elsewhere, the almost sexual openness of a bunch of green leaves idly filled with some crumbly yellow sheddings from another plant delivers a subtle but visceral shock. Then she pulls back. The erupting interconnectedness of nature, the compulsiveness of vines wrapping around the charred branches, is rhythm itself, laughably swarming, violent, bright.

At intervals in the show, Brooke interposed photos from a different series that looks at the walls of domestic interiors after the people who lived in them are gone. Basically, the pictures are of a newly shed home after a breakup. Hoops of discoloring on a wall evoke now-absent art that hung there; bloody splashes on the wainscoting are, well, interesting and oddly abstract. Something did get dropped, thrown, but we're three stories away from that now. There's no looking back. A nail is no less a nail when it doesn't hang something, but its power is pathetic, like a one-word poem, crooked, slim. The utter starkness of the domestic series pushes you back to the nature shots, primed by human rupture for lushness and thereness. Despite the bald hills and the burning, growth is unstoppable, it's all coming back. Even the absent dwellers are most likely living somewhere else, though not together. Brooke's is a cool and human portrait of a land.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group