Peripheral Visionaries

G. Gibson Gallery

122 S Jackson St, Suite 200, 587-4033

Through Jan 15

Judging by the trio of local photographers currently showing at G. Gibson Gallery, sometimes the best way to see a thing is to look at it indirectly.

The star of Peripheral Visionaries is Doug Keyes, whose technique involves selecting books, then paging through them, superimposing multiple exposures of the pages to achieve rich blurs of content. The works here include art books, a Bible, and illustrated science texts. Keyes' approach pays serious dividends in several of the art books. Bernd and Hilla Becher, photographers of industrial structures, have their typographic images of water towers reduced to a pair of evocative tangles of loose lines, as if someone had attempted to make a single charcoal sketch which encapsulated the features of all their subjects. Similarly, Karl Blossfeldt's austere, sculptural photographs of botanical forms are transformed into a lush and airy bouquet, and a catalog of Chuck Close paintings becomes a general portrait of all his subjects.

John Jenkins III looks at building facades or domestic details, then chooses a decentered, interestingly "off" frame, and shoots with blurred focus. His technique, popularized by Uta Barth, is pervasive in the late '90s, from Chelsea to Pioneer Square. One gets the impression that any image can be made more evocative simply by being presented out-of-focus. The best way to see and judge his works is to look at them from a distance, where the blur becomes less noticeable. The more banal images -- a dog, a parked '50s car -- are revealed as such, while his more mysterious works remain so. A detail from the coffered ceiling of a building, Untitled (Portland), begins to look like a creepily orderly residential street grid or an array of computer chips receding into the distance, while a close-cropped image of the top of a curtained and valanced window packs a domestic punch.

Eva Sköld Westerlind's pinhole camera photographs of a boyish doll are like David Levinthal or Laurie Simmons with a sense of joy and humor, which I hadn't realized they lacked until seeing Westerlind's works. Her doll dances like Gene Kelly through a series of adventures, distilling the excitement and terror of youth into evocative black-and-white images.