Deborah Roan at von Lintel

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Edward Leffingwell

However manipulated by computer software they appear to be, Deborah Roan's wide-format, multiply exposed photographs are the result of chance and mechanical process. Her subject is an unpeopled urban landscape--the buildings, displays, logos and electric signs of New York. Within this broad array, Roan locates specific images in store windows and illuminated signs and frames and exposes them on a roll of color film. Then she shifts pictorial context and runs the film through the camera several times more, producing random multiple exposures. After she processes the negative as a continuous strip, she selects and cuts the layered images into panoramas of three to five frames each. These are enlarged and printed. Hues are vivid and occasionally lurid: electric blues and yellows, intense magentas and reds. Mounted directly to thin sheets of aluminum, the prints are 3 feet high and as much as 10 feet wide.

Documenting the marketing of religion, Gia (2000) depicts a Chinatown sale of Christmas kitsch by focusing on an array of pricey pendant crosses, a Madonna and a head of Christ suspended from a battery of heavy gold chains, all in a palette of red, gold and blue neon. The title derives from signage in the window display, a reference to the Gemological Institute of America, an organization that provides certification of stones. Exploring the visual cacophony of nocturnal Chinatown, Roan layers the imagery of Greenpoint Bank (2002), superimposing an elaborate dragon puppet, a photograph of a Jack Russell terrier holding a bank check, and a gleaming spider. Silk Nails (2002), an example of noah's cinematographic impulse, recalls the bejeweled orientalist iconography of Kenneth Anger's film classic Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Her sweep of imagery focuses on silver mannequin hands with artificial fingernails. The hand to the left is wrapped at the wrist with a Christmas bow, a bold, fortuitous superimposition of the bright against the dark. Other sets of hands recede and come forward, one adorned with lavender roses, others emerging from a bed of artificial pine.

Roan enjoys not knowing what the layering of exposures will produce; she compares this somewhat random and obsolete method of rewinding and multiple exposure to the cinematic dissolve, but with less certainty in the result. Red Chair (2000) revolves around a Jacobsen-modern bentplywood side chair, set askew as though floating, superimposed over a store filled with products. There, Roan focuses on back-lit purple plastic signage, layers of audio ware and, to the right, racks and racks of DVDs. Kin to the intersection of images introduced by James Rosenquist and tweaked by Jeff Koons, her photos are the record of her time.