The Visual Studies Workshop New Mexico Connection.

Since the turn of the last century, New Mexico has been a mecca for artists: a place to escape the overcrowding and social restrictions of more formal East-coast cities and to live a life apart from the mainstream. Here, painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers find an accepting community of like-minded pioneers who draw inspiration from the landscape and the spiritual life of the Hispanic and Native American people. Creativity is not only tolerated but celebrated, and career typecasting is largely avoided. In Santa Fe, where one in five people is an artist, it is commonplace for doctors and lawyers to spend their free time in artmaking pursuits. This environment is a perfect complement to the philosophy and aesthetics of the Visual Studies Workshop.

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In October, James Hart, who attended the school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, set aside two rooms in his commercial photography studio in Santa Fe as an exhibition venue for a group show entitled "Then & Now ... the Visual Studies Workshop/New Mexico Connection," showcasing the work of a dozen workshop alumni who reside in New Mexico.

Judging from the pieces on view, even three decades after graduation, workshop graduates (and, in some cases, staff and faculty) place a premium on experimentation. Rules from the conventional art world are noted but given a back seat to individual expression, which borrows from wide-ranging visual influences. The show contained almost too much visual stimulation--all manner of photographic processes, painting, mural and book art, pinhole and camera-less imagery, as well as side-by-side comparisons of old and new work.

Some of the most intriguing work was presented by Jonathan Morse (VSW student 1972-1976, MFA 1977). His intricate Epson archival pigment pieces on canvas--part still-life, part collage, and part photography--consisted of three oversize images centered on a theme of redemption. One, suggestive of Catholicism, was dominated by an altar which Morse constructed of an airline vomit bag, three tomatoes, and a crucifix-shaped structure made of branches, all surrounded by a golden metallic color field. Another, of a red mesh bag and a handful of cherry tomatoes, referenced fertility. The third, and most interesting, featured floating sushi--tufts of cottony white balls with textured centers like multicolored fabric--a couple of cotton swabs, and lightning-like tendrils that called to mind a sea of molecules or an imaginative spin on DNA sequencing.

The connection between these and his offset lithographs from the mid-1970s is evident. Then and now, Morse's style is a blend of abstract and representational genres that echo painting. He teases his viewers with disparate elements that are not always easy to identify. The work is not comfortable to look at but confidently provokes the intellect.

Bobbe Besold (VSW student 1972-1974), who has curated several excellent local shows about the human impact on the environment, continued that motif here. Each large collage incorporated silver photography, color xerox, and computer-generated text on bits of paper. Her protagonist was the trickster raven of Native American mythology, who was depicted cradled in the arms of a woman, perched on branches, and in details of its sleek, feathered body. Mysterious, dark, and beautiful, the imagery was powerful and archetypal enough to stand on its own without Besold's accompanying cautionary tale of man's blindness to the ecological havoc he is wreaking.

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An entirely different take on the interrelationship between people and their surroundings came from Timothy Hearsum (student and instructor 1972-1976, MFA 1975). His enlarged strips of film, each containing three consecutive frames, are documentary photographs rife with humor and irony. One strip captured a mailbox decorated with the spots of a cow, silhouettes of a cowboy painted on the side of a house, and the wooden head of a cow atop an oil derrick. In another, Hearsum trained his camera on the anomalies of the landscape of the American West, including a perfectly square hole in the ground and a signpost marked "Siberia."

In the midst of great complexity, two simpler statements stood out. Joe Emery's (VSW staff, 1975-1981) semiabstract "Rochester 1976," printed in 2003, of the moon seen through the lush branches of a bush, was a fine example of the "color" that can be achieved in black-and-white, as well as a study in texture and composition. In his 1977 gelatin silver prints, Charles Stainback (VSW student 1976-1979. MFA 1979) transformed shovels and lawn mowers into figurative images.

Rounding out the show was work by Elizabeth Alderman, Greg Erf, James Hart, Leslie Knowlton, Deborah Flynn Post, Eric Renner, and Philip Zimmerman.

This exhibit demonstrated that the Visual Studies Workshop is a formidable laboratory for artistic inquiry. For these graduates, at least, the urge to grow creatively has been deeply instilled.