Review of Exhibition "Claire With Flowers"
IF KAYAFAS’S STILL LIFES and landscapes suggest portraits — the Havana balcony with its hanging clothes, the stretch of white crosses along an empty Mississippi road — Tama Hochbaum’s portraits suggest still lifes. In her current work, Hochbaum shoots close-ups of a variety of flowers and slightly less proximate pictures of her eight-year-old daughter, Claire. Yet emptiness in the form of large expanses of white space is at least as important as content in nearly all of her frames, giving both her flowers and her offspring the feel of something vaporous. Hochbaum’s interest in form (as opposed to Kayafas’s interest in humanity) drives her image making. In one series of four photos, Hochbaum allows only traces of Claire’s body to be seen. In one picture, eyes look out from a largely obliterated face; in another, feet rise into the air as if they were balloons about to float away. The effect is both gentle and gently disconcerting. What we see of the girl in these painterly, mellifluent, almost abstract photos at times suggests the remains from a plane crash, so much is missing. Hochbaum’s flowers — they range in size from about three to 30 inches — are frothy, delicate, sexual confections that enjoy the shadowy richness of graphite.