Lady Luck Blind

Fantastic Realities
By D. Eric Bookhardt
Gambit Weekly
Henry Miller once said, "A clown is a poet in action. He is the story which he enacts. It is the same story over and over -- adoration, devotion, crucifixion." The statement is from his book of paintings, The Clown at the Foot of the Ladder, and it resonates neatly with Michelle Elmore's photographs. In fact, Elmore's subjects are not only outwardly clownish, they are imbued with something of Miller's implied pathos as well.

Stepping into the gallery is a little like stepping through the looking glass. The photographs are BIG, typically 5 feet tall, with saturated colors and expressionistic perspectives. Even black-and-white prints seem to radiate invisible colors, perhaps because of Elmore's hyper-realized, and sometimes hyper- kinetic, subjects. The series is called Fantastic Stories, and the images really do suggest some sort of narrative, as if implicit stories were propelling her theatrical subjects into surreal situations. And, like all clowns, Elmore's are ciphers, colorful enigmas whose antics only partially conceal a wider spectrum of emotions.

Angels and Cold Water is a view of a winged female nude on a rock in a river. Alabaster white and a tad bedraggled, she suggests a painted angel getting her bearings after an emergency landing. The landscape itself is very pastoral in the tradition of Walden Pond, but that winged, naked angel in white paint is an intruder from the realm of imagination and artifice. More theatrical than natural, she looks monumental and yet introspective, perhaps even a tad hung over. It's that "day after" sort of introspection, and it makes for a striking contrast between the nature of the imagination and the nature of nature itself.

And that seems to be Elmore's chosen terrain: the subtle, shadow zone where human nature and wild nature coalesce. It's a contrast that reappears routinely: in Rudy's Fear of Clowns, a round mirror in a rocky stream bed reflects a startled face. Yet nature can also include the imagination, the subconscious and even the laws of chance, as we see in Lady Luck -- Blind, a view of a young woman in a dressy chiffon gown throwing a pair of dice. The dice seem to freeze in mid-air, as if suspended in time, and it's one of those pregnant moments when unseen forces hang in the balance. Just what, exactly, is as up in the air as the dice?

Elmore's images suggest that all photographs are memories, in a sense. Perhaps it goes back to childhood. When she was 5 years old, her mother was killed by a drunk driver, and a few photographs were all she had to remember her by. Photographs have been central to her experience of the world ever since. Because her images have a punchy sort of jack-in-the-box quality, their underlying gravitas may take a moment to sink in. In Star Tea, a pale, painted young woman in an evening dress ponders a cup of tea. She has braided hair and a pensive expression, which cast long shadows on the wall. Her features are mimicked by their shadow in profile, and what might have been just a nifty effect assumes a deeper resonance. Part of this is technical. Star Tea is a Lamda print, a digital process that yields high definition color "C prints," so even the film grain displays mystical qualities: an infinite polychrome mosaic flickering luminously within the shadows.