The photography of Louise Ingalls Sturges is now on view at Court on Mulberry Street. The exhibit, called Tangled Up In Blue, is a modest collection of color prints, hung in odd, tight groups along two of the store’s interior walls. Despite its confinement, Sturges’s work is remarkably expansive in visual scope. Each photograph, named simply for the place that it depicts, captures one strange locale after another; thus, the show comprises a sort of documented road trip, a compendium of unrelated images which find coherence not in shared subject matter but in common themes and moods.
At her best, Sturges gives us compositions of playful complexity. In Denver, Colorado (2006), we find ourselves in someone’s suburban backyard: in the distance is the corner of a dull cream-colored house, nearer to us the plaster statue of a horse peering over a white picket fence. The shot has been snapped at ankle-height, from amid the tentacular fronds of a cactus, as if we were an insect gazing up at a world overrun by humanity. There is, of course, horror and comedy here.
Besides a hearty sense of composition, Sturges has an eye for color. Several of her photographs are fine studies of complimentary tones. Grand Canyon, Arizona (2007), for instance, depicts a Stephen Shore-esque forest-green Ford parked along a strip of verdant woods. Light shoots through leaves and creates a sort of checkerwork across the ground, as if sky and earth somehow formed a single mesh. Here, as elsewhere, Sturges demonstrates that she has a knack for chromatic layering and a fondness for the droll suburban colors of yesteryear.
She has, too, an undeniable predilection for buttocks. Of the nine photos on display, three depict fleshy posteriors. It must be said that Sturges treats her subjects with reverence, peering at them from odd angles, describing both their natural beauty and bulbous absurdness. In Madrid, Spain (2008) we have a pair of nates wrapped snuggly in a nylon bathing suit, floating buoy-like in marvelously blue pool water; in Hollywood, California (2008) we glimpse a man’s naked back, lithe, brown, terminating in two tan lumps pressed temptingly against a bearskin rug. In Sturges’s only real depiction of a nude, Gloucester, Massachusetts (2007), a callipygian Venus (perhaps one of the young farm girls from Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists) withdraws into an evergreen forest, shapely bottom pale and winsome. These are among the most interesting of Sturges’s photographs, and certainly the most fun to look at. Take them in slowly: unlike the sun, moons may be observed at length.
