ART REVIEW : Fiskin’s Frame of Reference

In 15 black-and-white gelatin silver prints, Judy Fiskin continues her ongoing project to explore the culturally ambiguous structure of art. Numbered among the photographs at Asher-Faure Gallery in West Hollywood are some of the most compelling this gifted artist has made.

Fiskin’s now-familiar format--a black and white image, 2 3/4 inches square, crisply printed inside a much larger field of white--is crucial to the success of her enterprise. Commonly, we look through photographs, as if these ubiquitous images are transparent transcriptions of the world they describe. By contrast Fiskin’s format pulls you up close, nose to glass, to literally peer at an image residing on the surface.

This deft device frames the visual experience, rather than the picture. The spectator is put in a position parallel to that of the photographer at the time the photograph was taken: Suddenly, you’re conscious of looking at an image close up and cut off, exactly as it was isolated through a camera’s viewfinder.

And what do you look at?

More art. Fiskin’s photographs show the bas-relief on a Wedgwood plate, a cameo of carved wood, a detail of a painting by the late Tony Greene and so on. Each is a constructed view of the world, like the silver print you’re looking at. The fiction within the photographic image echoes against the fiction of the photographic object.

The most beautifully resonant picture is that of the Wedgwood plate, which depicts a scene from the “Iliad.” A classical motif (the “Iliad”) is interpreted in a neoclassical form (Wedgwood) transcribed by the classic modern medium (photography). With the camera as the great leveler, exclusive distinctions between kitsch and high art collapse in significance. The tragic grandeur of the Homeric myth is deftly embedded within the historic narrative of image-making itself, including Fiskin’s own.

Asher-Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (213) 271-3665, to Saturday .