Dale Kistemaker at MOCA Cleveland

Cleveland-born, San Francisco-based artist Dale Kistemaker photographs the miscellany of his childhood for his stark, carefully composed gelatin silver prints. His midcareer survey at MOCA Cleveland contained 86 works from 1994 to 2002. Displayed predominantly in gridded series, the photographs were printed slightly dark, so that the whites have a grayish tonality. Almost all show a single object, centered in the composition and in crisp detail, documentary style. The subjects are shot on white backdrops with no discernable horizon line, making them seem without place and not quite real, like a dream or memory.

In "The Village" series (1994), 21 photographs (all 20 by 24 inches) each present one element of a toy village, aptly called "Plasticville." There is a fire station, a suburban ranch-style house, the Town Hall with clock tower and a funny little row of seven plastic sheep. There is a tank with the word "oil" crudely painted on the side, suggesting a water tower photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher. In fact, the similarities in composition and display between Kistemaker's works and that of the Bechers cannot go without note. Yet his photographs of Plasticville have a distinctly different sensibility. The Bechers' water towers and factories are impersonal. In contrast, Kistemaker's Lilliputian village, shown grossly out of scale in these photographs, instantly reminds viewers of their own childhoods, when things truly did seem larger than life.

The show's largest and most visually striking photographs (1999, each image 40 by 32 inches) depict model railroad tracks. Shot from above, they transcend their banal purpose to become minimalist explorations of form. A single frame shows a perfectly circular track, in a triptych, the tracks form figure eight measuring 96 inches long, while in a four-panel grid, they are arranged in three slightly off-kilter concentric squares.

Two series from 1999-2002 are a slight departure. For the three works that constitute "Books and Music" (Books #1, Books #2 and Music Lessons), instead of a single object on a blank background, the artist photographed overlapping, collagelike configurations of open books, sheet music and drawings. "Books and Drawings" consists of a grid of 15 photos of single items, including picture books, worksheets from music lessons and drawings of space themes, as a child, Kistemaker had signed or rubber-stamped his name on many of the drawings, book pages and lesson sheets, long before they became "art."

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