Asian
Art News
Exhibition Reviews
Jenny Okun at the Craig Krull Gallery
By Collette Chattopadhyay
June / July 1998
Jenny Okun’s works exude a youthful, exuberant mood. Rather
than extending traditional photography’s search for the perfect moment
or shot, this European-American photographer accentuates the processes of searching
for the images as more significant than any single triumphal picture. Racketing
her film while it is still in the camera, Okun creates multiple exposures on
film that she later digitally manipulates. Presenting collage-like compositions,
her works play light passages against dark, while spinning grid axes into circling
matrixes that transform the solidity of stone, steel, and glass into cubist
visions of translucency and space.
This recent exhibition presented 15 new photographic Iris prints. Included were
images shot on commission for the new Getty Center in Los Angeles, as well as
photo-collages of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Cite de la Musique
in Paris, the Gough Clock in London, the Predock Library in Las Vegas, and the
ancient Native-American ruin known as Mesa Verde in Arizona. Predominately boldly
colored and fast-paced, these works evoke the clipped pace of city environments.
The earliest work in the show, however, entitled Mesa Verde Triptych (1995),
established a much slower and more subtle visual cadence. At first glimpse it
appeared to be a sun-faded sepia print, structured with deliberately balanced
horizontal and vertical axes. But with time, the work’s delicate analogous
color scheme emerged, playing muted beiges and pinks against bleached yellow
and soft ochre hues. One of the most poetic works exhibited, the Mesa Verde
Triptych was obviously a touchstone from which the subsequent works evolved.
One of the most striking later works is the Getty Entrance Triptych (1997) part
of a suite of six exhibited prints of the Getty Center complex. Setting sweeping
curvilinear lines against a structured vertical and horizontal matrix, this
photograph is bolder in color tone and more structurally complex than the Mesa
Verde print. Multiplying and refracting the skylight ceiling of the Museum’s
entrance pavilion, the photograph feted the building’s grandness through
the visual emphasis of repetition and manipulation.
While some have suggested that the faceted nature of Okun’s works converse
with Cubism, the tone and mood of these worked are considerably more blithe.
Certainly, replication and multiplication in these works carry a laudatory,
rather than analytic, overtone. Indeed, except for their lightness, the works
might be regarded as a witty secularization of ancient Buddhist imagery where
refraction and multiplication often function as symbols of power and magnificence.
But, perhaps all such ruminations are simply too heavy for these impish works
which — like a Disneyland roller-coaster ride — engender a giddy and
exhilarated consciousness. Infusing Western Modernist photography and painting
idioms with mass media savvy and new technology investigations, Okun’s
works are in the final analysis playful, perceptive, and progressive.