Review

Photograph from "Endurance + Memory"

Mark S. Luce
Endurance + Memory

7-9 p.m.
(opening reception)

The Bourgeois Pig
6 E. 9th St.
Lawrence, KS
785.843.1001

Hours: 7 a.m.-2 a.m. daily.
Runs through: July 3.

Gallery site: http://www.myspace.com/bourgeoispig

There's a sentiment, often expressed in songs and poetry of widely varying quality, that it's better to remember the good things about a person, place or relationship than mourn his/her/its end.

It's not the easy approach to take, but at its best it can lead to a clear-hearted (if misty-eyed) sort of love.

(Fine examples to be found here and here and here — and no Garth Brooks in the lot, I promise.)

That's the same approach Mark S. Luce takes in Endurance + Memory, his show of photographs and accompanying texts that opens tonight at The Bourgeois Pig in Lawrence.

It's not the approach Luce began with, though, when he set out 18 months ago to document smalltown and rural decay across his native Kansas. Over that time, he writes,  I realized the resilience of the structures that were being photographed. These locations have stories that at times whisper, at others wail. We shouldn't cry over what's lost. Instead, we should celebrate that it was there in the first place.

Luce takes an artist's approach to composing his shots; the image atop this post, for example, is as much a study in line and curve and texture as in rust and and abandonment and loss. And at the same time, the items in the photograph show signs of long use; clearly, someone was productive with them, and that is worth acknowledging and remembering.

Luce, who teaches English and writing at both the University of Kansas and The Barstow School in Kansas City, Mo., knows that the most affecting stories have a complexity that defies neat descriptions. That's what he offers here, both in words and in the wordless.

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