This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: October 29, 2008 - With "Refraction: Three Contemporary Photographers," St. Louis artist Amy Bautz has brought together, at the Regional Arts Commission's gallery, voices that represent the wide-ranging possibilities photography has to offer. To works by Antje Umstaetter, an established artist based in Berlin, she's added photos by two true-blue St. Louisans, Bob Reuter and Mark Douglas. The mix results in interesting chemistry.
Umstaetter is the conceptualist in the show, digitally manipulating images as well as slathering them with paint and doing other unexpected things to them. The gallery is nearly taken over by "Winner," an enormous cutout of a man in a swimsuit, presumably jumping into a pool. It takes up half a wall and establishes the odd energy present in all of Umstaetter's works.
Closely related is a series called "drippjump," consisting of several clear plastic envelopes containing little photo cutouts of jumpers and drips of white paint. Nearby, four large panels feature photographs of flowers, manipulated both digitally and materially, with that white paint reappearing in force. In these works, Umstaetter has a way of intensifying the digital/analog gap and questioning the very nature of vision, matter and form.
Umstaetter's works make for strange bedfellows with the black and white pictures by Bob Reuter, but the pairing is nonetheless mesmerizing.
Reuter's modestly sized, unframed prints are tacked pell-mell to the wall, in keeping with his casual printing practices and overall spontaneous spirit. Titled "Exile on South Grand," Reuter's images are the pitch-perfect corollary to the music he plays on his KDHX radio show, "Bob's Scratchy Records." Reuter scours South City, capturing its bars and barflies, its nightlife as well as life during the day. He's got plenty of grit on his lens and the kind of connections you can't earn overnight. His pictures run roughshod over photographic decorum, and while they look nothing like Umstaetter's, they share the same reckless creativity.
Just when you thought you had a handle on this show, in all its weird, gestural, ragged expression, the wall opposite delivers Mark Douglas' "Books" series. Meticulously matted and framed, the photographs at first appear to be perfect foils to Umstaetter's and Reuter's raucous efforts. But look more closely. In each image, the camera zeroes in on the bottom edge of a book, showing the rim of the cloth cover, the stitching and glue of the binding, and the pages as they spring away from it.
Underneath the pristine surfaces of Douglas' photographs, the books are unraveling -- paper is shedding fibers; weaves are becoming unwoven. These stolid symbols of learning are giving way to their fragile materiality. And all of a sudden, these pictures have more in common with the others in the room than you expected.
Ivy Cooper is an artist and professor of art history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.