Jay DeFeo at Mills College Art Museum

Despite her iconic status as creator of the epic painting The Rose, whole bodies of work by Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) remain largely unknown. Following the exhausting and cathartic project of creating The Rose (19581966), DeFeo withdrew from making art or engaging with the art world for four years. In 1971, just after returning to drawing, she took up photography, discovering a new medium for exploring her sensitive blend of abstraction and figuration. For about five years, she devoted considerable energy to photography, meticulously recording exposures and light levels as she became conversant with the medium. Although her photo-collages have been frequently shown (and were included in the Whitney Museum's 2003 exhibition of her works from 1956-77), this presentation of 30 black-and-white photographs from DeFeo's vast archive is the first comprehensive museum survey of her efforts in this medium.

Carefully composed and lit to augment textural details, DeFeo's photographs (all untitled) demonstrate the artist's interest in the conflation and mutation of organic and mechanical materials. Several are set-up still lifes fraught with psychological urgency and personal meaning. Three photographs from 1973 feature her dog's tattered and grimy leg cast strung up on a wall like a folk-art retablo. With their sharp focus and moody lighting, the works have the haunting appeal of the photographs of decaying carcasses by Frederick Sommer or the wrapped assemblages of her friend Bruce Conner.

A print from 1971 is a crisp close-up of DeFeo's dental bridge lying on a cotton tablecloth with a typed label beneath the image reading "my model ... out of my own head!" (The bridge is the subject of her "Crescent Bridge" paintings of the following year.) Another work from 1973 features six of her extracted teeth piled in a large clam shell. In this plainspoken memento mori, the armor is off, all defenses are down.

DeFeo's imaginative craft transforms everyday objects into resonant symbolic forms. A surreal-looking vacuum cleaner, a violin with a frayed bow and a shoe hanging on a wooden wall become forlorn vehicles of empathy and immense loneliness. DeFeo learned developing and printing techniques from her students at the San Francisco Art Institute and set up her own darkroom in 1973. Several pictures are darkroom manipulations involving smeared and dripped fixative. These reveal DeFeo's attention to surface effects and painterly process. Demonstrating a dazzling range and quality, the exhibition, curated by Stephan Jost, is an important step on the way to a full-scale museum survey of DeFeo's multifaceted career. [On view at Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum, Sept. 3-Dec. 18.]

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