Art Review: Images by Lauren Coulson, Annette Fournet stir feelings familiar, strange

Lauren Coulson's self-portraits appear distorted as through a fun-house mirror. The effects are the result of reflections from bent and shaped Mylar sheets.

"She Waited for News" from the "Lost Promises" series by Annette Fournet.

The exhibition of recent photographic work by Lauren Coulson and Annette Fournet at Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects is one of the most stimulating and provocative shows displayed at the firm's gallery in years.

Coulson's digital images, from her "Psychological Portraits Series," continue along lines she began developing as a student, but are no less startling for that connection, while Fournet's principal images in the exhibition take a surprising and risky turn from her previous efforts. Both bodies of work, however divergent in method and intention, draw viewers into their fantastical realms of emotional pressure.

Coulson's work is by far the more personal, though her technique establishes a sense of distance from the viewer. One could debate the notion that these weirdly stressed and distorted "portraits," virtually unrecognizable as the artist, were shot underwater, except that in several the bizarre figures look as if they're couched in flames.

The reality is that the grotesque images of the artist were made from reflections in bent, shaken and folded sheets of Mylar, producing "fun house" mirror results that extend into the macabre and nightmarish, when they're not actually sort of comic. That's the correct tone for these images that seem to shimmer and slide and veer around emotional and psychological states that may not be precisely definable but certainly conjure feelings of the familiar.

In several of the untitled images, the figure is not even recognizably human but trembles at the edge of the demonic; in others, the distortion is gentler, more clownish, almost vulnerable. In all, whatever the case, Coulson projects a sense of ghostly insight into what William Butler Yeats called "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," that squalid understudy to our daily lives, relationships and entertainments.

Speaking of ghosts, it feels as if Fournet's work is populated by specters of a historical and mythic past dredged from Europe's dusty cultural attic. The surprise is that the photographs Fournet has exhibited in Memphis over the past four or five years have been largely based on her "Sticks, Stones & Bones" series of stark, yet dream-like black-and- white images taken in an Eastern Europe, where time seems to have stopped somewhere between the Middle Ages and 1910. Five of these images are included in the show at ANFA.

The great leap that Fournet's more recent efforts have taken is into the field of found-object-collage photographs that combine old postcards and pictures, a dizzying array of visual artifacts and her own photographs in two series, "Lost Promises" and "Vestiges." Highly decorative — yet eerie and evocative — and elaborately matted and framed, these pieces tiptoe to the border of being "artsy-craftsy" but cannily do not step over the edge because of the intensity of the vision the artist brings to them and the precision and certain intuition with which they are created.

The "Lost Promises" sequence conveys an aura of unstated narrative in the detritus of forgotten lives, faded and misplaced letters, scenes of childhood from houses and villages that no longer exist, aimless immigration and ambitions and desires crazed and cracked from neglect and disappointment. In such beautiful and intricate constructions as "The Egg Farmers," "Russian Circus," "She Waited for News," "Mail & Memory" and the irresistibly titled "She Burned Down Some Lovely Places," Fournet establishes a tone of nostalgia and longing that never segues into romantic sentimentality, a feat that argues for an iron will on the part of the artist.

We look to art for the right questions, not for answers, and in these series by Coulson and Fournet viewers will feel as if the questioning includes them on an almost intimate level. Who are we? What is our past, how are we connected to it, and what does it mean to us? How many layers of personality and sensibility do we contain? It's up to art such as this to make us listen, deep inside, to the answering voices.

"Lauren Coulson & Annette Fournet"

At Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects, 1500 Union, through April 27. Call 278-6868

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