Joanne Lefrak at the Center for Contemporary Arts

Jeanne Lefrak's first solo show in Santa Fe continued an ambitious course for this young New Mexico-based artist whose striking body of new work, preoccupied with organic processes of decay and regeneration, conjures emotive themes of absence and presence.

The CCA's dimmed gallery comprised seven ethereal installations made of semi-translucent panels of industrial plastics or paper suspended from the ceiling, most approximately 2 feet from the wall. Ranging from 2 to 5 feet wide and 6 to 7 feet tall, their membranous surfaces feature dense shredded and lacy networks of vegetal patternings--leaves, sinewy vines, spindly twigs derived from photographs--that the artist has outlined or meticulously cut out with a handheld wood-burning tool. Angled light filtering through them from tracks along the ceiling composed spectral and melancholic orchestrations of blurry and crisp silhouettes and layerings of pale and dark biomorphic shadows that spilled onto facing walls and adjacent panels. The works' multiple and ambiguous viewpoints, which conflated foregrounds and backgrounds, positive and negative space, created ephemeral metaphors for the fragile coexistence of manmade and natural worlds. Building upon symbolist and decorative traditions of still-life drawing, these compositions also evoke a wide range of associations, including botanical drawings by Mondrian, Philipp Otto Runge and Ellsworth Kelly; Odilon Redon's charcoal depictions of part plant/part human creatures; and 19th-century silhouette painting and Islamic tracery.

The red acetate sheets of Flanders Field (2006), which tinged the surrounding walls with color, powerfully distinguished it from the cool nocturnal quality of the other exclusively black-and-white vellum and paper works. Punctuated by burned tracings of flowers and other natural imagery alongside peeled-away sections of red emulsion that revealed the masking film's clear acetate base, the work simultaneously suggested ebbing sunlight and embryonic states of life. (This poignant visual paradox is reinforced by the work's title, which makes reference to the famous WWWI poem by John McCrae that describes a field suffused with crimson poppies that have sprouted up in between the crosses marking the graves of fallen soldiers.) In further contrast to the other installations, the panels were tiered at varying distances from the walls. Beams of veiled light passing through them cast overlapping ghost images and dematerializing shadows of amorphous forms on surrounding objects and surfaces.

Lefrak's latest work, Super Service Drive In (2006), includes a video. It explores similar themes of desolation and evolution. Signs of life are eerily evident in the sound of humming motors and the moving headlights of cars projected through the intricate cutout delineations of an abandoned gas station framed by foliage on a vellum panel. Here, as in Flanders Field, Lefrak's contemplative works are strongest when they reconcile the cyclical dichotomies of loss and resurgent life.

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