Sally Gall: Subterranea
North American landscape painters of the 19th century, working at a time when our wilderness was first being destroyed, created sweeping mountain views that configured nature as a cathedral. Now two photo shows at galleries just across the street from each other offer implied commentaries on today’s landscapes. Sally Gall’s 16 black-and-white pictures at Catherine Edelman, images also collected in her book Subterranea, find in underground caverns some of the majesty of earlier landscape paintings. David Maisel’s seven color aerial views of California’s Owens Valley offer frightening, sickly beautiful images of ecological devastation. Are caverns the last refuge for nature lovers?
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Gall does include aboveground views that show cave entrances. Near the center of Entry is a jagged black opening in a desert landscape, cutting into the finely textured scrub. The nearby hole and a distant line of mountains create a compelling contrast–between movement into the earth and toward the sky, between the far-off horizon and the unknown realm beneath us. Different realms are also the subject of Quadrant, in which majestic cliffs rise from a body of water. The picture’s symmetrical composition–quartering the space into the sky, its reflection in the water, the cliffs, and their darker reflection–heightens one’s sense of different textures and different worlds. Hints of entrances in the rough cliff surfaces made me think not just about spelunking but about what might lie underwater.
