100 Days of Solitude

To keep art alive during the pandemic, Photoworks sent out a call for images that fit the theme 100 Days of Solitude. In the end, curator Joe Cameron selected works by 35 artists, which, appropriately, can now be seen exclusively online. The exhibit features numerous photographs of kids stuck at home, along with other signs of domestic life, such as Peggy Fleming’s close up of a book spine and Hugh Talman’s “Ceiling Reverie” featuring a fan and water droplets. Other contributors head for the seclusion of outdoors, whether natural, as with Rupert Chambers’ sandswept images of Taos, New Mexico, or manufactured, such as Shannon Turkewitz’s nocturne of green storage-facility doors and zips from red headlights. Some shun any pretense of circularity, such as Michele Egan’s jumble of chairs in a shuttered restaurant or John Milleker’s homage to Julia Margaret Cameron, featuring a girl dressed as a fairy standing next to a gate with a “closed” sign on it. Some of the most striking images, however, harness visual complexity. For instance, paired images by Julie Miller effectively twin a kaleidoscopic view of tree branches with an image of a woman’s growing hair. Meanwhile, Harvey Kupferberg portrays ruins of a canal lock as strikingly angular and disjointed, while Leonard Jewler offers an indistinct figure surrounded by a dizzying array of lines. Like many of the exhibit’s images, these pandemic photographs find their own way to depict disorientation—and they’re a time capsule of sorts, as we’re now far past the 100 day mark. The exhibition is on view to Oct. 18. Images are available at glenechophotoworks.com. Free.—Louis Jacobson