Art review: Storybook lessons for grown-ups in ‘Paper Thin’

Bottom line: Imaginative work with a tone that fluctuates between allegory and advertisement.

Photographer Patrick Heagney creates dreamy artificial worlds out of paper.

In the photographer’s work, paper houses blow away in a fierce wind, chunks of their mortar floating off into the atmosphere as the occupant reaches out, as if to save her crumbling home. Paper origami cranes fly through a blood-red sky, one carrying a woman on its back. Two children pause on the edge of a fire-ravaged paper forest, their faces and clothes smeared with soot, like something out of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale.

Ethereal in every sense, Heagney’s blend of images of real-life people and manufactured paper landscapes suggests a shape-shifting world but a world touched with an air of enchantment. Life is certainly precarious, Heagney’s work suggests, when it’s made out of paper.

Something is certainly amiss in the images on view in Heagney's solo show "Paper Thin" at Kai Lin Art, or at least radically out of line with reality as we know it.

Mixing actual people and these landscapes of paper oceans, trees, snowdrifts, clouds and mountains through the magic of photo editing, Heagney’s photographs have a peculiar tone. His images can suggest instructive storybooks with moral lessons for young children to heed. But they can also evoke advertisements in which grave illustrations of calamity and ruin are used to sell home insurance or financial advice. The images hang in a limbo between whimsy and practicality. As much as Heagney’s work can suggest a destabilized and anxiety-plagued world, it can also feel, at other times, like the kind of stylized Madison Avenue ads found in the financial pages of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal playing on those same anxieties.

In “Paper Thin Houses,” a sea of identical pastel houses in shades of melon, blush and seafoam are visible as far as the eye can see. In the foreground, a woman has ripped a hole through a window, as if to escape a stifling life inside and breathe fresh air. The image seems to advocate defiance in a world of faceless conformity.

Many of Heagney’s images feature such spirited women defying expected behavior like the Pippi Longstocking and Nancy Drew heroines who define young girls’ literature. Women have authority in Heagney’s worldview, less muses than powerful, willful agents of their own destinies, like the woman in “Paper Thin Out of the Woods,” riding on the roof of her home as her male partner hefts the house on his shoulders, a pack mule toting it to another location.

Such stories of upheaval and relocation also define works like “Paper Thin Boat,” featuring a man in a crisp blue shirt and a distressed expression — like a troubled stockbroker — floating on a roiling ocean in a paper boat crafted from the stock pages, perhaps lamenting an investment gone bad.

In other images, Heagney’s heroines appear to be bent on destruction, despite unpleasant consequences. In “Paper Thin Cliff,” two women use scissors to cut away at the ground of a massive cliff jutting out into the sky. One of the women, seated on the cliff’s edge, will surely tumble to her death when the final cut is made, but she continues, seemingly oblivious to her fate. Are they frenemies or feuding family members whose alliances have gone amok, and turned destructive? It’s hard to say, though the image of heedless action without thought has contemporary resonance, playing out in any number of social and political situations on a daily basis.