Photo exhibit blurs the line between image and reality.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

The David Joyce retrospective at Maude Kerns Art Center is as witty an art show as you're likely to find in town this year.

Joyce, who is difficult to pigeonhole as either an artist or a photographer, has spent his career fruitfully studying the interplay between photographic images and reality.

Starting a quarter century ago by photocopying his young daughter at the library at Lane Community College, where he spent much of his career teaching art, Joyce became known for making life-size black and white photographic cutouts of the human figure. He is, of course, the artist behind those flying people that greet travelers in the passenger terminal at Eugene Airport.

You'll find flying people at Maude Kerns, too. An athletic and nude young man takes flight in the multiple receding images of "Escaping Man," his clothes - actual cloth clothes - rumpled on the ground at his feet next to an actual blue chair and a photographic cutout of a disapproving woman.

Even chairs take flights of fancy in Joyce's world, then come hard to ground, as one does in "Hard Landing," a 1991 work of Joycean whimsy.

Curated by Maude Kern's Tina Schrager from Joyce's personal collection, the exhibit focuses, in part, on one of the artist's favorite themes: the self conscious relationship between artist and model.

In Joyce's world - as, perhaps, in real life - the photographer is always something of a geek, at best, and an exploiter of humanity, at worst.

This made nowhere clearer than in the 1985 installation "Art Photographers With Model" in which a pack of four avid photographers surround a single uncomfortably naked model, who alone of the group looks out to engage the viewer as if seeking our help or at least our sympathy for her plight.

Even more pointedly, Joyce uses an image of himself as the photographer in his 1984 "Photographer With Scenic Derelict," which shows him invasively photographing a sleeping Bowery bum.

At times in his career, Joyce has owed a clear debt to the sardonic eye of Diane Arbus, whose black-and-white photographs fairly reek with uncomfortable lower-middle-class angst. Joyce's models in this vein often look fat and sweaty and a bit sad.

Lately, though, his work has showed a lighter vision, adding color, for example, and working from a less obvious editorial stance. The most recent pieces on display at Maude Kerns are copies of photo mosaics Joyce has done as public art commissions, taking, for example, thousands of individual student portraits from a school and using them as pixels to make up a large wall image of several students.

As you move closer to and farther from these pictures, they shimmer and change, going from one image into chaos and then into another completely different image. The effect is predictable but still powerful.

At the opening reception for the show, a visitor dropped a bit of trash into an installation that combined a man's photo with a pile of actual trash.

"It's OK," he told a Maude Kerns staffer. "That's me in the photo."

Joyce's work is like that, blurring boundaries between image and reality, between pixel and portrait and between art and life. Go see it before the pictures get together and take flight.

Joyce will show slides and talk about his work at 7 p.m. May 7 at the gallery. Admission to the talk and during regular gallery hours is by $3 donation.

Maude Kerns, 1910 E. 15th Ave., is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday.

ART REVIEW

David Joyce retrospective

Where: Maude Kerns Art Center, 1910 E. 15th Ave.

When: Through May 16

CAPTION(S):

``Woman With Red Hair'' by Eugene photographer David Joyce is a mosaic of 1,600 photos. Viewed from a distance, the array of individual photos appears as a woman's face.