Alexandra Fuller, “A Participatory Universe: Dune”

I have noticed that people are very fond of views out of windows which show the window in the picture. I think the idea that the picture itself is a kind of window, that the view comes readily framed, is part of it.

– Peter Campbell, British artist and writer, in a letter to Anne Fender

We know that the parallel between pictures and windows has been part of art at least since the Renaissance in Florence, but Alexandra Fuller makes it new again in A Participatory Universe, her suite of photographs now at Finch Lane. Fuller is no stranger to using her various arts to change how we apprehend the world, having convincingly made the case at Modern West when, in May of 2023, she showed her stunning image-with-poem, “Abandon 01,” that we cannot dismiss any part of our actual history just because we find it distasteful or discomfiting. At Finch Lane, she gives an idea of how much more she can do with her camera as she captures some of the most personal and revealing views of nature since Group f/64—in the hands of artists like Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams—made the case for photography as the premier Western landscape form.

In the years since then, the Western landscape has largely divided between artists like Robert Adams and Ed Ruscha, who celebrate the populated West, and those who prefer to capture the spaces remaining between such evidence of human encroachment. Until now, painter Mark Knudsen was almost alone in finding ways to show the latter without entirely belying the former: his large images of the still-awesome Utah landscape almost always include an easily overlooked fence or a less subtle feature, like a highway overpass, often in the foreground.

Alexandra Fuller here contributes something that is not just such a visual connection, but a way of revealing what might be called the recombinant DNA that now exists, through our reformed consciousness, in the West. This philosophical view takes the form of her inserting the window not as the photo’s frame, but a fixture incorporated within the landscape itself, just as we are newly aware that we are viewing existence not from our earlier and delusional external point of view, but always and inevitably from the inside. Each of her large images focuses on the material reality of an earthly feature—rock faces, sand dunes, prairie grasses, the ocean’s energy, mounds of soil, a field of snow—all parts of a universe in which we all, in many different ways, participate.

Alexandra Fuller, “A Participatory Universe: Ocean”

While there is a pattern here, there is no one formula that fits all. Each encounter is an act of exploration. Standing before “Ocean,” Fuller confesses that the finished image gave her no feeling of mastery, or even comforting knowledge. Rather, at the opening of her exhibition, the surging waters in her photograph could not but bring to mind those at that moment threatening the shores of North Carolina and Florida. In spite of having made the image, she found it unsettling, even somewhat frightening.

On a technical note, while Fuller does work with traditional chemical materials, here she uses digital processes capable of exceptionally fine detail at any size. While she made her reputation in large part with motion pictures, it’s her use of still pictures that gives these a way of seizing and fixing the mind through the eye that is different from the impact of motion. Finally, by using large panels of expensive, glare-free glazing, she largely eliminates clues like reflections and glare to the artificiality of the process, thus creating a sense of the viewer’s actual presence at the “window” into nature.

Installation view of Alexandra Fuller: A Participatory Universe” at Finch Lane Gallery. Image by Geoff Wichert.

In “Dune,” “Ocean,” “Snow,” and one version of “Grass,” the window merges with the photo frame, while its presence is revealed by the way the earth visually flows through the opening and spreads into the foreground. In each of these, the effect is to expand the viewer’s awareness of relationships like within/without and above/below. In “Dune,” “Lake,” and the other version of “Grass,” the window is farther from the eye and stands free, like a monumental arch or a Neolithic structure, which conjures up another mystery of the human encounter with stone, soil, sky, and weather, reminding us of their long duration, if not permanence. There is one, however, that steps back from the natural world and contemplates a uniquely human question: how we encode meaning. In “Establishers of Meaning,” the window looks inward, perhaps, to how we learn to understand, while Fuller has pinned various “specimens” to the window’s frame. These include sample photos and text proofs cut to mimic the way the earth flows through the windows elsewhere. There is also a scrap of paper torn, seemingly from a notebook, that bears a quotation from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream—Act 5, Scene 1:

As imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.

To an artist who works in still and moving formats and writes poetry, it’s clear that each of these disciplines brings about its own realm, but by working together they are able to “body forth” the subject of so much of our thinking today: the presence in us of nothing less than our Earthly nature.

Alexandra Fuller, “A Participatory Universe: Grass”

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.