Lynn Geesaman at Thomas Barry

Lynn Geesaman's recent show of C-prints conveyed the well-known Minneapolis-based landscape photographer's fascination with the stereotypically genteel gardens of Europe. Hinton Ampner, England (2000), for instance, depicts a vast English garden in which two fat, mushroom-shaped topiaries rise from a yellow-green lawn beside an opening in a long shrubbery wall. Beyond the opening is an lovely patchwork-quilt landscape of fields and groves. In Palacio de Viana, Spain (2002), a white-washed wall backs up a red-tiled courtyard. To the left, a turquoise-blue doorway opens to another sunny-golden garden space, and to the right is a large vine with broad leaves the color of bright pond algae and yellow flowers like swipes from Monet's brush.

These images might be dismissed as the romanticism of an American on holiday were it not for a few subtle artistic adjustments that reduce their certainty and make them almost dreamlike. Foremost, it's her darkroom manipulations--or so gallery information explains--that make the details of Geesaman's landscapes gauzy, with washed-out colors and shadows of yellow or gray-clue.

In Andalucia, Spain (2002), birch trees line up in ranks like silent soldiers on a tufted, dewy-green ground cover. The landscape beyond the trees is a barely perceptible line of gray. The sunlight is an overexposed gray-blue haze, and the trees' limbs are faded, making them seem like ghosts. The trees open up somewhat in the middle to reveal a vertical strip of pale background. In fact, nearly all of Geesaman's images feature routes through the landscape, paths that often open to bright spaces beyond the soft foregrounds. Does the artist mean to imply that the beautiful, idyllic gardens and landscapes are fantasies, and the real world is waiting somewhere beyond the haze? Whatever the case, Geesaman renders unsettling the quaintest of European scenery.

--Michael Fallon

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