Vicki Ragan, Anthropologies
Since its invention in the 19th century, the art of photography
has transformed the way we locate memory and the tools we use to identify or give
meaning to the visual moments of our lives. From the start, photography was a touchstone
for our collective dreams and our shared sense of history, whether personal or
cultural. For Vicki Ragan, an artist whose works traverse numerous idioms, the
photographic lens has acted as a partner in her ongoing explorations of thought,
memory and sense of place.
An obsessive collector, Ragan's studio is a
veritable Wunderkammern filled with oddities and objets d’art and the endless
parade of knick knacks that line her walls and shelves. Tiny pitchers and
decorative plates, wooden chairs, vintage pictures and maps, sea shells, buttons,
plastic bugs, matchbooks and little animals spill out of storage boxes. These
are the raw materials with which she choreographs still life elements and the visual
poetries of remembrance, mysticism, presence and waking dreams. In much of her
work, she shares in the Surrealist dislocations of Man Ray and Merit Oppenheim,
the lyricism of Odilon Redon, Joseph Cornell’s precision and mysticism and the seductions
of what Susan Sontag called “the melancholy object.”
In The Little Dress Series,
Ragan transforms a gauzy undergarment into something unearthly – even beatific
– an object that evokes loss, divinity, tenderness. The little dress, her muse, has traveled with the artist
across the U. S. and throughout Europe and Mexico since she acquired it in
2001. In these places the dress serves as
a marker, locating time and place somewhere
in the dreamy threshold
that
exists between twilight and dawn, sleeping and waking. In Provence, France, 2007, the little petticoat
hovers on the tips of long grasses that splay across the French countryside. Delicate,
diaphanous, the object glows from within as if it possessed its own light
source. The embodiment of childhood is implicit.
Early in her career, Ragan worked at Brandeis University as a
scientific photographer where she was routinely asked to document objects that
she didn’t understand and sometimes couldn’t identify -- molecular models and
the like. Perhaps this experience played a part in Ragan’s attraction to the visual
conundrums she often employs in her work. In juxtaposing elements and shifting the
meanings within identity, memory and concept, Ragan has come to create her own
mythologies. Whatever form her work
takes, it exudes a kind of articulated wonderment in which even everyday
objects seem in touch with a higher power. Ragan
has a special ability to convey timelessness and mutability, to invoke
hallucinations and to marry fantasy and reality. JMG
Vicki Ragan, Anthropologies, Islip Art Museum
February 9 through March 27, 2011
