It’s been a long time since people believed that a photograph never lies. David A. Douglas’s images are proof that these days, photos lie a lot. On view at the Academy Art Museum through October 13, his powerful photo-encaustic landscapes and still lifes are simultaneously dreamlike and strangely real.
If you just glance at them, you might think you’re looking at vintage photos blown up to museum-scale panels but that’s an impression that won’t last for long. Some of these works show historic buildings but others present bland modern houses. These may sit beside decidedly un-scenic ponds where some trees cast reflections but others don’t. Sometimes the perspective is curiously wrong. Sometimes patches of grass and leaves are photographed at different scales. Surreal details appear, like a boxwood bush growing in the interior of a ruined old brick house. Then there’s the enormous thumbprint hovering above the bush. What gives?
Now living and teaching in Alexandria, Virginia, Douglas earned both his degrees in painting, a BA from Virginia Intermont College and an MFA from James Madison University. He still sees himself as a painter although he chooses to use digital photography and his computer as his tools along with the more painterly mediums of encaustic wax and acrylic gel. He layers images in the computer, prints them, paints on them, cuts them apart, layers in other images, scars them, draws on them, scans them back into the computer, and repeats the process again and again. His images may go through dozens of incarnations before they are finalized, and the effect is that you see the artist’s hand throughout the work, yet it has the credibility of photography.
There’s so much fascinating stuff going on in Douglas’s work that it’s hard to know where to start. Firstly, thanks to his innovative process, these elegant black and white images are mesmerizing. They’re filled with peculiar, even comical details to puzzle over, and they have a striking visual richness and sensuous depth created by brushy layers of encaustic wax. Secondly, those same details aren’t quite what they seem. Plus, they call up many art historical influences and concerns, especially questions about photography’s role in art.
A quick glance at “Study for Portrait of Scout Dreaming” shows a scarred and shadowy image of a frame house standing beside the water. It has a reclusive loneliness reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting, but something’s not right. The concrete steps leading down from its front walk flare out at a very odd angle. And there’s rippling water on each of the steps. The background on one side of the house is a seascape; on the other, it’s a fenced field. Not only are these backgrounds inconsistent (note the art historical precedent in the Mona Lisa’s mismatched backgrounds), but the reflections in the water in the foreground don’t fit the shape of the house.
This is a dreamlike image worthy of any Surrealist, and like all the works in this exhibit, it’s a visual feast of imagery melded with painterly marks and suffused with soft light and velvety black shadows. Using photographic tricks and painterly ones, Douglas splices image after image together, setting up an uneasy balance between “reality” and intuitive associations.
“Bull Run Study” might easily be taken for a contemporary of one of Civil War photographer Mathew Brady’s shots. There’s the historic Stone House complete with
its split rail fence, but Douglas is toying with historical fact: it’s reflected in a pond that doesn’t actually exist. Not only that, he’s digitally shortened the vertical axis of the reflection making it considerably more squat than the house itself. He’s getting mischievous again.
Far from being documentary photography, these artworks are chockfull of borrowed images woven not quite seamlessly into pictorial fictions. Sometimes you get a
sense of time and history in the murky dark shadows and the fading branches of bare trees that call to mind historic photographs like Brady’s. Sometimes a solitary figure or a stark landscape seen through a window will make you think of Andrew Wyeth’s bleak autumn scenes. Sometimes, especially in Douglas’s larger-than-life “portraits” of flowers, there’s a self-consciously dramatic beauty that calls to mind Robert Mapplethorpe’s stylized photographs.
This is interactive work. You’d have to live with one of these images for a long time to really get to know it. But spending just a little time with this exhibit, you begin to see the point. Some of it’s true; some is false. But it’s not just about jokes and illusions. Douglas’s work is strangely evocative and haunting. It invites you to attend closely and work out the truth for yourself.
So much of life is artificial nowadays. Instead of natural forests, lakes and meadows, housing developments, streets and shopping malls are the norm, and we spend more and more time in the virtual world of digital information and images. Douglas is playing with the fact that, individually and culturally, we are creating our own realities.
Knowing full well that old houses evoke nostalgia, that we honor the value of history, that trees reflected in water are beautiful, and that there’s nothing like the green grass of home, he gleefully picks and chooses what he wants to appear in his works. Dreamlike but plausible, each presents its own version of reality, and each is an object lesson in how we do the same.
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