Let's play the free-association game. I"ll say a photo and you tell me the first photo tht coms into your mind. Mother. Father. Parent. Child. Young. Old. Permanence. Change .In his show of 20 works at the Art Center Association plays a witty game of free association using old and new photographs of his parents and himself. Much of the work is already done for you, but you can interpolate your own images, your own perceptions, your own family, your own pictures in the game.
It's not really meaningful to speak of the works as photographs. They are, rather, combinations of several photographs, working together to make sometimes humorous, sometimes somber coments about the process of aging. There are no circles in Anderson's geometry. It's a tight system of strong lines and sharp angles. Color plays against sepia tones. Patterns are established. Images multiply and repeat themselves. Aggregations of small photos reverberate off a single large picture. Bands of small photos creare frames for larger ones.
If photography is indeed a language, then some of these works are poems with a subtle rhythm and a comples rhyme scheme. Anderson has titles his show."Change." Many of the works are done with the same two or three photos of his parents, taken apparently in the 1930s. these are combined with current photos to produce some unsettling results. For example, about 30 identical photos of his mother, taken several decades ago, eyeglasses and facial lines contrast with smooth-skinned, sepia-toned youth. But - and this is the enigma - in voth images, the woman wears the same bemused expression; the same eyes gaze penetratingly through the camera to the viewer. One of Anderson's recurring motifs is the quilt. My favorite work in the show, a two-part portrayal of his mother, uses this device.The same sepia portrait is overprinted with a red, white and blue quilt pattern. On the left side, this image is repeated in a grid four photos wide and four deep. Throughout
these photos run bands of dark and light strips, edged with a pinking-shear tooth. The bands tie the 16 photos together in a labyrinthine pattern that spills from one frame to another, only to double back on itself in a never-ending rhythm. On the right, a single image as large as the 16 small ones together offers the eye a tranqul resting place form the energy-charged left side.
For all the vitality of this image, however, Anderson's most interesting statements come in the treatments of his father. A Freudian would have a field day with some of the combinations. One two-part piece shows, on the left, a portrait of his fatner as a yound man shot against a contemporary dark green setting. On the right side, the portrait is gone; and empty frame surrounds a nebulous field of dark green and black.
The evocation of tombstones and lush graves is unmistakable. The strongest and perhaps most revealing work Anderson has titles "Father and Son." It is the tale of two generatrions redolent with Oedipal overtones. The first picture, in correct exposure, is an early portrait of the elder Anderson. Lying over the part of the portrait is a large triangle of broken mirror in which appears a dark, almost undiscerable face. In the second picture, the fatner's portrait fades out with overexposure, while the mirror - now correctly exposed - show the younger Anderson. There's no mistaking the statement that youth supplants age. But what should one make of the fact that the sharp, jagged edge of the broken mirror cuts across the neck of Anderson's father.
All is not deep and heavy, however. I hesitate to give away the plot and punch one of some of the humorous works, but mentioning a couple will give you the idea. A sel-portrait of a very hirsue Anderson is a workman's shirt bearing the name "United Rug" is a broad stroke. But one has to look closely at an eith-picture series of father and son to see the cigar shift from the elder Anderson right hand to left and wind up at frame eight in his mouth like some punctuation point personified.