Review

"Breathing 2", from "Breathing: 12 Minutes 37 Seconds", Archival Photo Print from Film Original.

Cathy Denning
Amorphous Durations

1-5 p.m.

Kaw Valley Arts and Humanities
756 Armstrong
Kansas City, KS
913.371.0024

Hours: 1-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday (call for appointment)
Runs through: June 5

Gallery site: http://www.kvah.org

Like all simple devices, the pinhole camera has its shortcomings. (Give it a break ... it's almost a thousand years old.) One is that because of the considerable exposure times required, a photograph will blur if its subject moves.

Cathy Denning has taken that limitation and made it a tool for creating the images in Amorphous Durations, her show at Kaw Valley Arts and Humanities. Denning used her pinhole camera to record small significant motions -- talking, breathing, making love -- through long, continuous exposures.

I consider these works to be documents of movements as singular events, Denning writes in her artist's statement. Bodily movements are tracked within a specific duration of time. This duration spans the physical and material length of the film.

So, for example, Breathing: 12 Minutes 37 seconds -- the piece from which today's featured image is taken -- is a long exposure of Denning inhaling and exhaling. It's tempting to say, "doing nothing more than inhaling and exhaling". That would be a mistake. Those are expansions and contractions no one can live without, even though most of us are fortunate enough not to have to think about them.

Denning, who just graduated this month from the Kansas City Art Institute, used a seamless technique to create her works. That's literal, not merely figurative. While clear indications of progressive exposure exist, there are no frame lines in her pieces. They flow together, compounding the rhythms of the motions they record. The effect is both sensual and clinical, detached and intimate.

Denning also used the technique to create a landscape, Trace a Line Around the Perimeter, for this show. It's a long, unbroken, haunting piece -- less a depiction of place than an exploration of how our memories of any location change and flow.

The same could be said of the overall impact of Denning's motion studies. No matter how intimately one can know someone or something, even the most detailed recollections of object, place or person will shift and blur over time. Memory, like a pinhole camera, has its limitations.

Then again, blurring isn't always a bad thing. Losing a few crystalline specifics can free the mind to recognize underlying rhythms, patterns and emotions. What Denning demonstrates in two dimensions and black and white, we can apply in our measureless, multisensory inner worlds: Sometimes, the things we see as limitations and imperfections aren't.

Sometimes, a perceived constraint is really a key that makes it possible to escape the prison of the ordinary.

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