“Risk/Revisit: The Photography of Gary Hallman”

It’s hard to compress Gary Hallman’s fruitful three-decade career into a single gallery show. Though he’s honored here with a one-person show spanning both floors—the sum of all the PARTs, as it were, and only the fourth time they’ve done this—we found ourselves wanting to see more. The show begins circa 1971, with Hallman’s outdoor shots focusing on interplay between light and shadow. In the 1980s, the U of M art professor moved away from pure photography into deliberately manipulated images like “Rayos de Luz y Calor,” a self-portrait shot through with hand drawn beams of light. Unlike most fine-art photogs we know, Hallman has embraced technology over the years. His 1990s experiments with computer-altered self-portraits obscured his face behind deep green and red fans. They’re perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most colorful in his portfolio. Hallman’s not afraid to reinvent his methods, nor to go back to classical photography when there’s still something to discover. Other work moves in a surreal direction: Pompeiian frescoes share space (and fate?) with bland suburban house-scapes, and a swarm of nudes streams between the heads of two men like a thought they share but can’t shake off. His most recent work changes course yet again, this time returning to formalism for a set of industrial still-lifes that coolly observe the sterile kitchens and computer rooms at Wells Fargo’s downtown operations center. PARTS, (612) 824-5500, partsphoto.org


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