Photo Unfinish

Photography, in the traditional sense, takes a holiday at the Architectural Foundation Gallery this summer. Jacqueline Woods has pushed the medium to divergent and conceptual places through her crafty use of archival and often random “found” photographs, negative imagery, treated or tattered paper, and other means of alteration and rerouted meanings.

Woods’s show goes by the intriguing title How Forever Works, which poetically touches on the elements of borrowed nostalgia, memory channeling, and ancestral emotionality implied in these photos once invested with personal resonance. Although she has also worked with traditional photography, Woods’s fascination with this body of work has taken her to national and international exhibition contexts, including the AIPAD Photography Fair in Manhattan and as a contributing artist to the Wright State University (Dayton, Ohio) show ReWritten: Photographers Reshaping the Narrative.

Narratives, or teasing scents thereof, ripple throughout the Architectural Foundation space, but always with a cryptic sense of mystery and unfinished business. 

There is nary a “straight” shot in the space, unless we count the pointedly deconstructed — and, by the way, decapitated — portraits of “The Weight of Legacy” and “Traditional Hierarchy.” Here, patriarchy gets some comeuppance in the form of men in business dress, symbols of societal empowerment, with heads and faces crudely torn off the aged prints. 

Bodies appear in varying states of abstraction or flotation, both tactics that strip away the feeling of grounding in conventional figure or portrait photography. Faceless and featureless women from bygone eras appear in silhouette — in “Standing Woman (Silhouette No. 1)” — and in a doppelgänger-like positive/negative face-off in “Profile of a Standing Woman.” It’s as if the two halves of the image present polar opposites of the subject’s identity. 

Swimming femme fatales are sent adrift in some dark enigmatic space in “The View from Here” and in a photo collage aptly titled “Between This World and the Next.” Meanwhile, “State of Mind” finds a woman diver in mid-body arc, amid a murky visual domain that resembles the tube of an ocean wave.

It could be said that Woods’s art in this show explores dualities in different ways. In “Primordial Man,” four slightly shifted variations on the image of a man in ultra-soft focus — his materiality rendered as a fleeting impression — evoke invented archeological imagery. 

History herself is as murky as the available light in “Exquisite Allegory” —  squinting is recommended for beholders in the gallery. A faint impression of pyramids is detectable on ultra-close scrutiny, buried in a dark void: such is the nature of visions of deep antiquity.  

Speaking of suggested narratives, one corner of the exhibition is devoted to Woods’s series “Untold Stories,” shown at the Duncan Miller Gallery in Los Angeles. In these pieces, the artist fastidiously rolls up fragments of “found” prints and gathers them into groupings, and every grouping tells a story (doesn’t it?). “Bets Are Off” banks on a casino reference, consisting mostly of numbers and a dandy betting man with a neat tie and gambler’s grin. “It’s Complicated” returns to Woods’s theme of courting between zones and identity ambiguity: two women appear here, but one’s face is viewed through a cut-out window of another print, evoking secret lives and motives.

In all, Woods draws us into her expressive netherworld with How Forever Works, performing innovative operations on “found” photos, which have been gently abused and artfully repurposed. Essentially, through her efforts and creative rethinking, cast-off imagery has found new meaning, worthy of an art-worldly embrace. 

For more information, see afsb.org.