Continuing through May 3, 2014
Through triptychs, photo series and other means, Linda Ingraham is consistently engaged in the joining of ideas: humanity and the natural world, conformity and individuality, oppression and freedom, to name a few. Dualities provide the common thread in Ingraham’s solo show “25 Years of Mixed Media Photography,” a compilation of more than 70 works by this longtime Arizona artist.
Ingraham’s primary medium is the black-and-white or sepia-toned photograph, which she further explores by boxing the photos or applying them to a heavy panel with resin. Often the main subject is positioned onto a neutral background in a photographic construction. In fact, unusual juxtapositions of objects through image manipulation is one of Ingraham’s trademarks, which she elevates to surrealism in a work such as “Flock of Lemons,” depicting four idealized lemons with leaves as wings, all of them “flying” in formation over rolling green hills. Similarly, “Limoncello Triptych” features a lemon on a string making its way over a romanticized countryside. Bird imagery is commonplace, often to suggest reverence for the natural world or freedom, as in “Yearning,” a dark, house-shaped hanging box in which the bottom image is outstretched hands and the top image is a bird in flight.
Making a more biting comment on society are Ingraham’s nude photos, especially those in which she asks limber models to contort themselves into wooden boxes that she’s constructed. In the foot-high work “Oppression,” for instance, the black-and-white photograph is of a nude balled up into self-negation, while the smaller wooden box that frames the photo is tightly held together with screws and wingnuts.
