From the South End News, June 12, 2002 Framed Reflections of Emptiness: Photographs by Mary Lang, through June 28, at the Kingston Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave. 2nd fl. Architects of Landscape Val Maass, Arts Writer As an art, photography inarguably relies as much on the artist’s ability to see or find a vision as on their talents for representing that image through a photograph. In her new, one-person exhibition, Reflections of Emptiness, at the South End’s Kingston Gallery, artist Mary Lang’s photographic hand is unmistakable. But it’s her photographic eye that’s astounding. Adeptly executed in both color and black and white, Lang’s series of 14 large-scale photographs are straight depictions of leaves, trees, clouds and birds, or are they? Actually, her unmanipulated photographic images are reflections of various natural phenomena in water or ice that, in some cases, are turned upside down to read as complete landscapes. “In many ways, I have turned my life upside down (this year) and not surprisingly, that is reflected in my work,” says Lang. “Not knowing whether you are looking up or down, turning an image upside down to reveal a more profound truth, opens one up to other possibilities.” In Lang’s magical melding of water, earth and sky – where water’s mirror-like quality allows it to transform into other elements – lily pads becomes clouds, as in “Purgatory Cove,” and floating leaves become stars hovering in a clear, evening sky above a tree-lined landscape, as in “Westfield River.” In “Flowed Meadow” and “Flowed Meadow II”, puddles become windows into another world, where floating leaves and reflected branches become a transparent collage of flowers and trees or a luminous cascade of snow. The duality of Lang’s splendidly confusing images is often disorienting, but it challenges you to figure them out – something that the straight-forwardness of photography often neglects to do. Among the other images in this exhibit, you’ll also find simpler reflective shots – all of which share the elements of water, land and air. In “Straight Wharf,” Lang captures the simple beauty of trees reflected upon wet Nantucket cobblestones, while in “Medici Fountain,” she creates a visual tapestry of twisted trees reflected in a Parisian fountain. In others, Lang catches views from a dock or riverbank while walking her dog, such as ripples on the surface of the Charles River or Newton’s Crystal Lake. “Vivid direct perception can inform the mind below the surface of consciousness,” says Lang. “I try to point at this possibility of experience, while still aiming my camera at ordinary forms of land and water and air.” And whether you find them immediately clear or slightly elliptical, Lang’s everyday images of ‘emptiness’ are quite full of allure and new meaning…..