Art review: Mystery abounds in emerging artist Tommy Nease’s photos

Bottom line: Unique, moody work from an emerging talent.

Photographer Tommy Nease’s images resemble something channeled from the subconscious directly into a photograph.

Like the dream sequence in an Alfred Hitchcock film, Nease’s silver gelatin photographs of a woman pierced by an arrow, a boulder balanced on a hillside, a body curled up into itself surrounded by a halo of light are visitations from another reality. In his black-and white-photographs, this peripatetic young photographer captures snow-topped mountaintops and walls of obscuring clouds that give both a surreality to the physical world and a feeling of being suddenly in nature’s powerful embrace.

For the Jackson Fine Art show of the Seattle-based, Southern-born Nease’s work “Nocturne,” the photographer’s evocative work has been unceremoniously wedged into one of the gallery’s ancillary rooms, hung above a wall of flat files. With such arresting work from a promising, emerging artist (Nease is just 24), it makes you long for a little more risk-taking on Jackson’s part and better gallery real estate to truly appreciate the work. Nease’s prints are small by contemporary photography’s standards, most of them in the 11-by-14-inch range, and there are too few of them.

“Nocturne” definitely leaves you craving more from Nease and from the city’s premier photography gallery that seems to have settled into a routine of presenting already anointed photographers more than pushing forward riskier, untested work.

A deviation from the usual crisp, articulated black and whites of much fine art photography, Nease’s work looks like something divined in a fever dream rinsed in murky, muddy grays. With their lack of the kind of identifying characteristics that place them in one time or one place, Nease’s images have a timeless quality. His “Nocturne” photographs convey a powerful sense of photography as a potent, ambient mood piece forged from the gradations of light and dark as much as a representational or storytelling form.

Nease has two principal fixations in “Nocturne.” One is a majestic but slightly sinister, thrilling vision of nature reminiscent of the often eerie treatment of the natural world in Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s or Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s work. Perhaps that sense of nature’s grandeur and unsettling power comes from Nease’s current job, fighting fires in the Pacific Northwest.

Nease’s other obsession is with weird, mysterious portraits that leave you a bit addled and confused as to what you’re seeing. “Chalten” is one of the artist’s otherworldly landscapes, a vision of a mountain range whose peaks edged with light can look more like a vintage illustration than a conventional landscape. Nature, seen through Nease’s vantage, hums with intent and meaning: The mountains, hillsides and clouds appear sentient, as if caught in the pause between breaths. In “Celest,” a human figure stands highlighted against the darkness, and a swarm of stars has filled her body, setting her aglow like a human lantern. Figure and landscape both are animated with strange, magical properties in these photographs.

Nease’s images vibrate with mysterious significance, like the climactic moment in a film whose story we don’t know: the plot-twisting event, the startling revelation. To his great credit, Nease takes two traditional photographic standards, the figure and the landscape, and renders them uniquely strange.