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Sneak ing a peek around the other side of the X-ray machine at an
airport can be more than a little unsettling.

Never mind that the security guards don't take such snooping very
kindly; it's eerie to see the mechanical eye at work, to look

through the opaque surface to view the hidden contents of a
container. Especially if it's your container.

In "Outside/In," one of four exhibits that make up the "Resident
Aliens" exhibit currently on view in the CEPA Gallery (the others
are by Gary Cardot, Jeanne Dunkle and Alison Slein), Pat Bacon turns
that mechanical eye to several opaque containers to articulate the
unease caused by breaches of privacy. Against a black background,
photographic images of containers are paired side by side with
X-rays of their contents. The interiors contain various arrangements
of found objects, ranging from the humorous to the disturbing and
bleak.

Positioned in careful tableaux, the meaning of the same objects
within the containers transform image to image. An X-ray of a drab
structured purse reveals a fish, complete from tip to tailfin; a
sight gag that creates a goofy, ambiguous narrative. In another
image, the X-ray rendition of the same purse shows ostensibly the
same fish. Only this time, the fish has been bent at the belly, its
roe spilling out to pool at the bottom of the bag. Bacon transforms
the fish from a joke to a reflection of some deep psychological,
distinctly feminine pain.

Bacon's containers hold content of emotional value, religious belief
and sexual orientation just as our minds hold our identities, which
brings up the question: When the line between personal effects and
personality can be indistinguishable, is rendering our things
transparent any more justified than doing the same to our minds?

While Bacon's work literally brings the inside out, Cardot's
photographic images - large-scale black and white prints of urban
scenes - focus on the outside.

The images, none of which contain people, project an emptiness in
their stoic beauty that seems unnatural. The prints read not as
pictures of buildings, but portraits of a time and place. Scenes of
urban blight are contrasted against images in which Cardot renders
the architectural into the sculptural, turning buildings and
industrial structures into graceful studies of form. In these
prints, steel girders and grain elevators take on the same clean,
sweeping lines as the Saarinen-designed Kleinhans Music Hall.

 

 

e-mail: kdeforest@buffnews.com