Ms Behavior and Then Some: McCoy Gallery Exhibition 2015

composite photograph by Bill Paarlberg

Ms. Behavior and Then Some

McCoy Gallery

A photograph is an image, a record and a recognition.  As an image the photograph presents the proposition of being worth our visual attention, perhaps because it is simply visually appealing – seeing registers pleasure—perhaps it is a curious sight. As a record it displaces time and holds a singular and past moment.  The reality of that moment may or may not have been actual, but the photograph suggests a real something that recalls a convergence of light, color and form. The convergence may be seen as a circumstance. The photographic function of recognition is more specifically an opportunity for recognition, since recognition requires a viewer, a witness.

Nancy Grace Horton’s photographs are deftly emphatic about these features to the point of stretching the image and its location in time to a circumstance that signals a real, albeit odd, present. The women in Horton’s pictures inhabit their spaces according to and against the structures that contain them.

Horton’s women invite or recognition of their circumstances and suggest that such recognition includes our own presence somewhere within the frame. The images in Ms. Behavior and the images in Mad Women each intend possible narratives and as such they place their subjects among us as we invent stories based on the photographic evidence.  Our lives touch.

A convergence of circumstances is implied. As viewers we may not recognize these particular women, but we are awakened to something familiar about them, something in the way they respond to objects, to water, to the read hot coil on the stove, daring to or compelled to tread to close. How odd for these persons to behave as they do in the world…how odd is the world itself, an environment so fluid that it requires more than imagination to be part of it.

A photograph needs a place of performance, where things meet in time. Where adjustments are made, where strategies for seeing and for being come together.  Where something nearly happens.

Artist and Cutator, David Raymond