Portland, Ore.-based photographer Holly Andres balances humor, artifice and a feeling of menace in her show "The Fall of Spring Hill," on view at Jackson Fine Art. It's the carefully calibrated, high-production-values menace of "ABC Afterschool Specials" and vintage classroom filmstrips crystallized into a series of nicely oddball photographs.
In these vivid, color-drenched photographs the artist imagines a world of two extremes. On one side are the mothers, a group dressed in early 1970s garb who congregate in an air-conditioned church preparing a sumptuously outdated spread: neon-green Jello, paprika-dusted deviled eggs, bologna sandwiches on white bread, and a punch bowl filled with an assaultive red liquid. And outside, in the bright sunlight, their children play. From toddlers to preteens, they romp in the summer landscape, their attention captured by an elevated fort onto which a small blond boy has climbed.
Nostalgia is baked right in to the images. Andres builds a powerful sense of time and place in the retro food, kitchen decor, polyester leisure suits and the mothers' smocked sun dresses. In her images, she recounts a seminal childhood memory. Stagey, stilted photographs create a sense of expectation in every frame, building to a tragedy. The cinematic quality of Andres' photos shows the influence of other artists devoted to such stylized vignettes: Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Cindy Sherman. But where those photographers often leave huge questions about what exactly is going on, Andres' storytelling is precise and linear, like a child's picture book or comic book panels. She leads you carefully to a conclusion and provides foreshadowing, parallel action, close-ups and establishing shots borrowed from filmic storytelling.
Andres populates even the benign images of mothers preparing the banquet with harbingers of doom. In the show's opening image, "The Watermelon," the sliced fruit is in close-up — cut with an enormous knife. The image hints at violence even within this cozy domestic scene. In a later image, "The Fall," two mothers bend to pick up the shards of a broken coffee cup. One woman holds a baby. Another lifts a glass punchbowl. Things broken and perilously close to being broken figure in a picture that foreshadows the fall to come: A cherubic blond child is carried, unconscious, by some of the older children down a hillside. In the picture play's denouement, the furious mothers destroy the fort from which he fell.
Andres crystallizes personal anecdote into potent myth. Her images feel like a version of a real event, played on stage. The sense of vengeance enacted by the mothers feels like a Greek myth transplanted to middle America. Though the series is flocked with absurdity at the edges — baseball bat-wielding mothers in polyester leisure suits attacking a fort! — there are big ideas: the loss of innocence, separate worlds of adults and children, the nature of memory —including what is real and what we embellish — and, perhaps most fundamentally, the rupturing of a safe and protected sense of life when tragedy strikes.
The Bottom Line: A potent series of photographs that use cinematic techniques to explore memory, lost innocence and personal mythology.
Art Review
"Holly Andres: The Fall of Spring Hill"
Through Sept. 8. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. Free. Jackson Fine Art Gallery, 3115 East Shadowlawn Avenue, Atlanta. 404-233-3739, www.jacksonfineart.com.
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