Review: 2 photographers, 2 different effects in uneven Chastain show

Bottom line: Two photographers play with perspective and express psychological states in artwork that doesn’t always play well together.

Ordinary things turned on their head and made odd are the fixation of a two-person show at Chastain Arts Center Gallery, “Perspectives of the Unexpected.” The exhibition spotlights two Atlanta artists, Sarah Hobbs and Susie Winton. Both have a thing for regular stuff — snapshots, Magic Marker, magazines — employed to feel, well, more than a little off-kilter.

Hobbs’ favorite stage set for her anxiety-laden dramas is the bedroom, that domain of private behavior and secret lives. Her large photographs look like settings for some avant-garde theater piece, in rooms scrubbed clean of detail save for the human mania on display.

In the most intriguing, visually seductive work in the show, “Untitled (Voluntary Mental Facility),” a sun-drenched bedroom has been overtaken by homemade yarn god’s eyes, those projects of middle school art class and sleepaway camps. Stacked up against a dresser and a nightstand, covering the room’s walls, and even the windows, those colorful handmade gewgaws suggest craft tipping over into mania and obsession.

An even darker strain, suggesting an unruly destructiveness, attends “Permanent Marker (Occupied Room),” in which a white bedroom has had its headboard, lampshade, drapes and even its floral wallpaper defaced with black marker streaks. Hobbs’ images take places associated with normalcy and invests them with intimations of pathology, suggesting private lives harboring dark secrets.

If Hobbs’ preferred format is the oversized photograph so popular among contemporary artists, then her comrade Winton’s favorite medium is the much more humble, quotidian snapshot. While Hobbs adopts the perspective of advertising and documentary photography, Winton’s vantage is often a vertiginous, you-are-there perspective that can give you the feeling of, literally, walking in the artist’s shoes.

In Winton’s most engaging, winsome project, “Delete,” the artist confounds our desire for the perfect view by placing a distracting thumb into every shot. The collage of images runs the gamut in subject matter, but every time, there it is: that fat, fleshy interloper, ruining the shot.

That same sort of quirky perspective attends another series of tourist-style snapshots taken in places like Crater Lake, at the Venice Biennale, Yosemite National Park and closer to home, North Highland Avenue. But rather than home in on the majestic landscapes and stellar views on these trips, Winton playfully zeroes in on sneakers and asphalt, persistently looking down rather than taking in her surroundings. It’s both frustrating and comical, a purposeful subversion of the expected travelogue.

Taking a detour into 3-D work, Winton turns Art in America magazines into sculptures, cutting through their pages to create accordionlike shapes displayed on shelves extending from the gallery wall.

Hobbs expands her work into three dimensions, too, with an installation called “Counting (Almshouse)” in which the artist has wrapped the four pillars at the center of the gallery with scraps: ribbon, rick-rack, fabric, yarn, shaping it into a kind of room. The piece brings Hobbs’ ongoing interest in obsession and repetitive action to bear in new form.

There are some engaging works and vantages in “Perspectives of the Unexpected,” though the two artists don’t feel especially well-matched. Hobbs is interested in psychology splayed out onto the material world, while Winton seems more interested in perspective, and frustrating or confounding our desire for a perfect view in photography. There is a disquieting sense of uneasiness and distress on view in Hobbs’ work. But Winton seems more interested in formal experimentation.