From the Boston Globe GALLERIES By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent, 3/22/2002 Water, land, fog Two doors down Thayer Street at the Kingston Gallery, Mary Lang's landscape photographs aim to capture the sacred in nature through the camera. One of the original intentions of art must have been to portray the sacred; certainly Marioni achieves that in his paintings, and Sullivan, making art in the eternal moment of dissolution, touches on the sacred. Lang takes a more traditional approach and offers some startling, lovely photographs. She puts too much stock into the liminal and transformative qualities of fog; many of her photos feature mists shrouding water and land. These need some editing. Nonetheless, enough images stand out to make this a worthy show. One vaporous piece that works was shot from above the mountains in eastern Washington; the mountains' dark spine spoons with white clouds imbued with light. A black-and-white photo shot in Auburndale shows speckles of snow on a frozen ground, with patterns of sunlight flitting over them. It's delectable; the rhythm of light played against the rhythm of white on dark makes this small photo into a thrilling little dance. Of the color images, two shot at Crater Lake, Oregon, stand out. In one, a cloud reflects on impossibly blue, still water; the other shows the meander of a mountain's reflection on turquoise water. These are potent in part because of the high-voltage color, but they also help us see the familiar in a new way. That moment of quiet followed by a sparked imagination touches on the sacred.
This story ran on page C18 of the Boston Globe on
3/22/2002. From the Boston Globe Photos make the ordinary unexpected by Cate McQuaid Water World Mary Lang shoots reflections on the surface of water, then she upends the photograph, turning the images upside-up. The result - in a show at Kingston Gallery - delightfully defies our sense of what’s real: the glimmer of water, or the stand of trees? Lang is a Buddhist, and she succeeds in her intention to illustrate that what we believe is real is truly an illusion and may dissolve with the skip of a stone. The show needs editing: Too many of the photos are pat images of water,, with not enough reflection. But when the reflection is strong, like “C&O Canal, Potomac River, Bethesda, MD,” the landscape flitting over the limpid water and the glimpse of grasses beneath the surface make a wonderful metaphor for the elusiveness of reality. Friday, June 20, 2003
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