2 engaging exhibits at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta

Over the course of a productive decade, Angela West has tried her hand at art history’s venerable genres: landscape, portraiture, still life. In “Trigger,” her evocative exhibition at Jackson Fine Art, the Atlanta photographer adds trompe l’oeil to the list.

Translated literally, as “fool the eye,” it celebrates the kind of verisimilitude in painting that photography just about put out of business. Crisp images of dead fowl, trussed and hanging on strings, and folded notepaper casting shadows on the wall bring to mind the likes of 19th-century American artist John Peto.

Of course, genres per se are not the subject of West’s work. Rather they are platforms for her exploration of self, memory and the possibility of finding the universal in the personal. “Sweet Sixteen,” a portrait series of girls in their party dresses, speaks of teenage rites, ripening sexuality. In “Familiar Landscapes” -- views of the streets, flora and driveways in the Dahlonega neighborhood of her childhood -- she endows otherwise ordinary sights with significance by the fact of her attention.

These and other photos convey a will to fix her history in the amber of her images. Time, the subtext, becomes the subject in two series focusing on flowers, typically symbolic of ephemerality, one of wilted floral arrangements, the other, her old prom corsages.

The photographs in “Trigger” -- as in memory trigger – are similar in spirit and composition to the corsage series. She presents keepsakes -- postcards from a college beau, notes on ruled paper from high school -- isolated in an empty space. In several pieces, unspooled cassette tapes, love songs from her adolescence such as those with which she’s titled all the works, drape white walls.

Though spare in their presentation, these objects are talismans, not clinical specimens, of her past. Anyone who experienced a teenager’s romantic angst might respond to the images with the same nostalgia and vague melancholy.

For the artist, now 39 and pregnant with her second child, the present and future are suggested in “Love is Love,” a photograph of her daughter’s room, with the miniature carriage on the bureau counter. Like the pins that stick, voodoo-style, through the corsages, and the blood on the trussed fowl, the foreboding brownish drip down the wall in “Love is Love” darkens the tone of their pristine aesthetics.

But edge is relative: Roger Ballen pushes us off a cliff in “Boarding House,” a series of disturbing tableaux he’s concocted using raggedy toys, live animals, disembodied hands and feet and his own graffiti, set in a squalid interior, which, like everything else in his pictures, bears a patina of grime and neglect.

The two bodies of work set each other off. The South African photographer shoots in black and white; West works in color. Her world is middle class; his bespeaks grinding poverty. West makes drawings out of cassette tape; his are mangled coat hangers.

In a counterpoint to the grace and gentle emotions of West’s photos, Ballen, who considers his photographs embodiments of psychological states, pulls us deep into the dark, inchoate realms most of us would prefer to avoid. If Diane Arbus made still lifes, they would look like this.

Catherine Fox is chief visual arts critic of http://www.artscriticatl.com

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