Jane Wenger’s photos repel while they attract
By Dean Jensen
Sentinel art critic
Chicago, Ill. – It has now been two years since photographer Jane Wenger was been so fired up by an idea that she had to pick up a camera. Her creative dry spell has prompted more consternation in her friends than it has in herself. She mimics those who try to prod her into work.
Studio & Gallery
“‘When you gonna go back to photography, Jane … ? When you gonna do something new?'”
Ms. Wenger is not very good at hiding her states of perturbation. Her blue eyes smolder and one wonders if these regular flameless fires account for why, when she is only 36, her hair has become the color of smoke. “You know what I tell these people? ‘ Le-e-e-ave me-e-e a-lone.’ It is hard enough for me to work when I’m onto an idea. There is no point in my trying to work when I don’t have a strong idea. I’ve tried it and hated what I produced,” she emphasized. When another idea comes along for a new body of work, Ms. Wenger said, she will work like a madwoman, but until then, she will concern herself with sheer survival.
SURVIVAL IS A TOPIC for which Ms. Wenger seems qualified to write a book. She lives in a quiet residential section on Chicago’s North Side. A few blocks away, on Milwaukee St., is a seedy business strip with stores that try to hide their decrepitude with paint jobs in the garish purples, chartreuses and oranges of a carnival midway: Max’s Fresh Fish, Libinski Furniture, Jerusalem Gen. Mdse ., Sexy Lady Clothing Store.
She owns her own property – fortress-like, 19th century stone townhouse that she bought for $21,000 and, with a City of Chicago rehab grant, beautifully refurbished. She receives rents from two dwelling units in the building and supplements this income with earnings from a variety of part-time jobs – cab driving, teaching photography, telephone sales, painting and scraping, even housecleaning. While she considers photography an important part of her life, she said she does not ever want to demand that it provide her with a livelihood. “If I was going to reduce it to a way of making a living, I would turn to commercial photography and make real dollars at it,” she said. ” There are times when my existence is hand to mouth. But I don’t put pressure on myself that I have to sell my work. It’s one area where I will make no compromises.”
WHILE SHE HAS NOT picked up a camera in two years, her reputation as a photographer has not gone into eclipse, but continues to spread: Some of her work is included in a current group show at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. Earlier this year, she had a solo exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and her second one-woman museum show will open Thursday at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Jane Wenger: “I don’t put pressure on myself that I have to sell my work.”
Her work has won critical encomiums and has started to find its way into important public collections, including that of the Museum of Modern Art. As yet, however, it has been slow to catch on with private collectors, that might be expected considering her ability to produce images with such chilling, nightmarish qualities. On the one hand, her photographs seduce the viewer because they are so meticulously printed with rich dramas of light and dark. On the other hand, her photographs repel and even startle the viewer because their imagery is so distant from what we perceive as real.
IT IS EXACTLY this pull-push of forces – the alluring beauty of the prints’ technical qualities versus the repelling quality of the subject matter – that Ms. Wenger strives for in creating the photographs. “I want my work to draw you in at the same time it pushes you away,” she said. ” You don’t want to move closer and you don’t want to move away.”
Ms. Wenger does all of her work in series form so that each image in a body of work comments on the other. One series involves an anonymous bald man whose mound-like head, but never his face, looms forbiddingly large in vast panoramas of open space. Ms. Wenger’s photographs somewhat recall those disorienting Rene Magritte paintings in which subjects that we usually perceive as big have been made very small and the small made very big. If anything, though, Ms. Wenger’s photographs may have a greater effect subverting our sense of reality than do Magritte’s startling pictures. This is because we have come to accept photographs as accesses to realities we have not experienced at first hand and our psychic equilibrium is upset by seeing “proof” – the camera’s documentation – for the distorted, nightmarish world revealed in Ms. Wenger’s art.
MS. WENGER CREATED another large body of work by taking portraits of body builders hefting iron into the air in a contest. She drastically cropped the studies of straining faces during the printing stage so that in the finished works, one just sees parts of the faces, sometimes just the mouths and the noses that have nostrils that seem as large and deep as cannon barrels when viewed so close up. Because the radically-cropped faces are too incomplete for the viewer to see the subjects as real people, he is forced to consider all the gigantically-sized noses, mouths, pores and whiskers as abstract forms rather than as facial features. Ms. Wenger showed 10 of the body builder faces at the Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year. Each of the prints was blown up to 4 by 4-foot or 4 by 6-foot scale. They were shown as part of an installation piece that included a sound track with the grunts and groans of the body builders straining mightily to push their weights above their heads.
Ms. Wenger’s fascination with photography began in 1964 when she was a liberal arts student at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y., and persuaded an instructor there, John Wood, to create a photography class of one for her so she could learn the basics of picture taking before leaving on a planned European trip. “From the first moment I picked the camera, I knew it was my tool,” she recalled. ” I couldn’t draw or paint, but I had an esthetic sensibility and I knew I had found my tool for expressing it.”
Ms. Wenger’s show here will continue through Oct. 18. She will talk about her work at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 24.
Let’s Go, MILWAUKEE SENTINEL, Friday, August 14, 1981