The Gambit
Review: Cinematrope, by Ryn Wilson
D. Eric Bookhardt is intrigued by the new show at the UNO St. Claude Gallery
When we were young, we may have dreamed that our grown up lives would
be like movies, epic adventures in which we were the stars and wrote
the script instead of our mostly uncool parents. Only as adults did we
learn that life is a collaboration of luck, intention and circumstance
even if our dreams remained as cinematic as ever. Walker Percy explored
this theme in the novel The Moviegoer, and now Ryn Wilson offers her take on it in this Cinematrope show, in which she often stars and writes the script, yet mostly remains a creature of context. Especially emblematic is Traces
(pictured), a photograph of a woman toting a vintage valise into a
foggy forest in a dreamlike scene that recalls Francoise Truffaut's
flair for pastoral surreality. Here the setting dominates an image that
evokes a deeply psychological sense of exile. Similar subtleties are
heightened in a series of elegantly oblique diptychs, but Hitchcock sets
the tone in The Fallen II, where a young woman in a short
schoolgirl dress sprawls lifelessly at the bottom of a winding
staircase. Wilson assumes a more personal role in a video of herself
running alongside Cary Grant in the airplane scene in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and peering in windows in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, but most of her work effectively taps the psychic reservoirs of cinematic myth we carry around inside us.
In Sophie T. Lvoff's recent photography show at Tulane University's Carroll Gallery, the city itself was the star. Shadows of ironwork on cemetery walls mimicked the secret iconography of Voodoo hexagrams as cat's claw creepers scaled the walls of a desolate hardware store and ghostly figures in outlandish costumes appeared trapped behind fogged plate glass shop windows. Lvoff's understated images effectively evoked the intimate surprises that lurk, mostly unnoticed, around every corner: the secret lives of inanimate places and objects.
— D. ERIC BOOKHARDT
through April 6
Cinematrope: photographs and mixed media by Ryn Wilson
Friday-Sunday
UNO St. Claude Gallery, 2429 St. Claude Ave., (504) 280-6493; www.unostclaudegallery.wordpress.com
In Sophie T. Lvoff's recent photography show at Tulane University's Carroll Gallery, the city itself was the star. Shadows of ironwork on cemetery walls mimicked the secret iconography of Voodoo hexagrams as cat's claw creepers scaled the walls of a desolate hardware store and ghostly figures in outlandish costumes appeared trapped behind fogged plate glass shop windows. Lvoff's understated images effectively evoked the intimate surprises that lurk, mostly unnoticed, around every corner: the secret lives of inanimate places and objects.
— D. ERIC BOOKHARDT
through April 6
Cinematrope: photographs and mixed media by Ryn Wilson
Friday-Sunday
UNO St. Claude Gallery, 2429 St. Claude Ave., (504) 280-6493; www.unostclaudegallery.wordpress.com
