JANE WENGER PHOTOGRAPHS

Milwaukee Art Museum Photography Gallery August 20- October 18, 1981

This selection of 33 works from the last 15 years of Jane Wenger’s work traces the development of the artist’s vision from student experiment through early professional achievements to accomplished maturity. Five stages are represented, including a selection from each of the artist’s five most important exhibitions to date.

This is the first exhibition to offer an overview of Wenger’s powerful and controversial work. She is a precisionist in darkroom techniques-a classic photographic artist. She is not, however, a prolific one. She works when she has registered feelings which impel her to do so from inner necessity. While Wenger is knowledgeable in photo history, her images are drawn from her own life experience, from objective worlds we often overlook and from psychological feelings we seldom share.

Wenger studied ceramic design and photography at the State University of New York, Alfred. She has been quoted as saying that she recognized the camera was to be her tool on first acquaintance with it under the tutelage of John Wood. She continued to draw and paint and to work in clay through the completion of her BFA in 1966. But she then elected to concentrate on photography and to pursue studies at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

The three introductory photographs in the exhibition stem from Wenger’s days at IIT, and they reflect the climate of experiment in which she trained. The nude reflected in a polished metal bowl is dated 1966: the distortion found in the reflection was a direct response to contemporary influences. The image of a model holding a condenser lens which exaggerates and distorts her eye and face is from 1967-68. The third work was exposed by cycling an entire roll of film past a slit in the camera back. After development, the artist selected appealing chance compositions, of which this is one. The distortions, simplifications and fragmentations of these images relate the artist to historic modernism, expressionism and surrealism, with specific references to Picasso and Bill Brandt.

The artist’s first important exhibition was held at The Juniper Tree in Spokane, Washington, in 197 4. She was invited to join Henry Lyman, a ceramic artist she knew from Alfred, in a two-person show. Wenger set out to produce a new body of work on the theme of the male nude. She eventually settled on a group of 40 images for the exhibition from one of the most fruitful periods of shooting in her career. These depictions of largely headless male figures have a mystery about them. The subjects are slender, hairy young men who are generalized and unspecific because they are symbols of maleness rather than individuals. One series of three closely related photographs includes two images of standing figures, isolated in a field, motionless against the sky, sculpturesque but not idealized; while the third image is of a striding figure, reminiscent of The Walking Man of Auguste Rodin. The poignant sense of isolation in the first two images and the headless rush of the third image suggests the artist’s recognition of these contradictory and coexisting pulls and tensions in human existence. The nudity introduces questions of primal states, of the stripping away of civilization’s social protections, and the awareness of sexuality.

In the next group of three images the male nude, always photographed from the back, appears to flap his arms in imitation of the motion of flying birds. This tense expression of the effort to fly, to rise out of the earth-bound state is myth provoking. In fact, from this point onward in Wenger’s work, the expression of muscular tension as a reflection of inner states of mental and emotional energy is a constant. The suspended motion of one male figure, in which the subject’s hands are pressed against his back above his buttocks, implies indecision, the inability to take action, a Hamlet-like impasse.

The next substantial body of work was triggered by the opening of a photography space by the members of Artemisia Gallery, Chicago, in 1976. The participants agreed that they would launch the gallery and introduce themselves through a series of self portraits. In a flurry of work carried out in a relatively short time, working both alone and with one or two helpers, Wenger produced a series dealing with the female figure in a rigorously reductive, abstract manner. The seven images included here seem after five years to be the most powerful works from that show. They are all images of female body elements, small in measurement but huge in their sense of architectural scale. The female force in these images is enormous. One cannot recognize the person but neither can one ignore that these photographs are proclamations of sexual fecundity: they celebrate the miracle of the life force.

The third body of work was first shown at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center in 1977, as part of a two-person show with Harold Allen, a colleague and friend. The new series turned again to the male figure, concentrating on the averted bald head. The heads, with their unfamiliar skins, veinous and arterial systems are throbbing with physical life. These faceless depictions of the masculine presence are metaphors for phallic energy.

Checklist All photographs are silver-gelatin prints and are lent by the photographer.

All are available for purchase.

Early Photographs 1 -3 Male Nude Series,
197 4 4 -11 Self Portrait Series,
1976 12 -18 Bald Head Series,
1977 19 -24 Face Series,
1980 25 -33.