Art Review: Huger Foote's 'These 18' captures cosmic in mundane

"These 18," the name of Huger Foote's exhibition of photographs at David Lusk Gallery (through Saturday), offers a rich field for interpretations. First, that since the photographs are untitled, a thematic exhibition title is unnecessary. Or, these are the 18 images that the artist decided to show this time, to the exclusion of many others. Or, here are 18 images out of the untold infinity of images available for the seeing and taking in the entire unreasonably varied, demanding and beautiful cosmos.

Huger Foote's tight focus and random subject matter remove visual context from his untitled images, yet the objects gain a kind of order and beauty through their sheer presence.

The latter interpretation may seem far-fetched, if not downright New Age-y, yet Foote's method of close focusing, of exploiting randomness, sometimes to the extreme, and of paying minute attention to the discarded, the forgotten and the overlooked, forces viewers into the enviably god-like position of seeming to look at everything everywhere simultaneously. That perspective is abetted by Foote's frequent tight focus that depletes and defeats context; when context is absent, what fills the void except for the universal?

Foote, son of the late novelist and historian Shelby Foote, has lived in Astoria, Ore., for several years, and though most of "These 18" pictures were shot there, where the Columbia River debouches into the Pacific Ocean, they betray no sense of place except the everywhereness in which all objects suffer their slow dissolution.

By "the entire unreasonably varied, demanding and beautiful cosmos," I mean beautiful by default, because a great deal of the cosmos is ugly, and much of what Foote turns his camera toward is nondescript, broken, of questionable value or simply, well, ugly.

Yet the act of giving, say, a pile of junked automobile fenders or a torn-open chain-link fence tangled in dry branches or an overturned outdoor table in long grass (referring to three of these images) a singularity of visual purpose imposes a beauty in order and selectivity, not to mention a sort of phenomenological crisis in the viewer. How much of the chaos and sheer pressure of the objects with which we share the cosmos — or just the room where we sit and type — can we take?

The uncanny quality of reproduction — these are Iris inkjet prints — contributes to the allure of Foote's images. The wealth of detail, the marvelous gradations of color, the subtleties of shadow, the weight of light lend these pictures a presence that enthralls the eye, even when, as in one of the best of these images, the subject is a completely mundane corner window of a small business with, inside, a few magazines laid on a coffee table and, outside, a stone wall and cracked sidewalk. Oddly, though, when Foote seems to be trying for a beautiful effect, as in a couple of landscape images, the result is prettiness that's a little strange but not strange enough.

No, Foote feels more natural not turning his camera on the natural world but casting a measured eye on the riotous and mundane urban environment in all its existential possibilities and ambiguities. Several of these pictures, in fact, lean close enough toward abstraction that this viewer at least had little idea of where he was standing and what he was supposed to be seeing. In a sense, these are the most comforting works in "These 18," taking us completely out of ourselves into a realm where the achingly familiar touches the unknown.

Huger Foote, "These 18," with Joyce Gingold, "New Porcelain Work"

At David Lusk Gallery, 4540 Poplar Ave. in Laurelwood, through Saturday. Call 767-3800.

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