Photography copyright of Malone Mills, courtesy Frank Pictures
The photographic exhibit of Malone Mills, Orbgasm, is currently ongoing at Frank Pictures, Santa Monica, is both a visual and sensory experience. The exhibition ends on Febuary 10th, 2009, with the opening reception last Saturday.
This is her second exhibition at Frank Pictures and a continuation of her fasination with the presence of Orbs, whose presence she can detect with camera and film. Which is not an issue that I need to address.
The current exhibit does reflect a more cohesive series of photographs with a delightful use of color, which seems to attempt to explode off the edges of the photograhs. This effect is made even stronger as the photographs themselves are floating on the walls of the gallery.
Your eyes want to investigate the contents, but you are visually pulled in every direction by the massess of lights and colors that are intertwined within the photographs. Is is far easier to allow your self to take the whole experience in rather than try to make sense of the parts. For Mills, the answer seems to be easy, to look & see and there they are, and aren’t they just wonderful.
For the rest of us, it is much like experiencing an abstract expresionist paintings, to enjoy the plastic elements of the line, color, mass and visual movement contained within these photographs made in the dark.
Some of the photographs do contain some comprehensiable content, such as the photograph, above. And trying to understand the Orbs, you are struck by the presence of the Starbucks on the wall of the building and perhaps another clue, the inclusion of the Camera Obscura. As Mills states, you decide.
Best regards, Douglas Stockdale
