See-through art

Edie Bresler does windows

by Leon Nigrosh

EDIE BRESLER, THROUGH MY WINDOWS

at the Fletcher/Priest Gallery, 5 Pratt Street, through November 9.

When we look out a window, we focus on the view not the glass. That's the idea, of course, but in the early '90s, photographer Edie Bresler became intrigued with fact of windows as

an invisible presence and looked for a way to bring them back into our consciousness. So she painted some colored lines on the window of her New York City apartment and photographed it from the inside, beginning a nearly decade-long exploration of the relationship between the "transparent membranes" that surround us and what lies beyond.

Fourteen large and colorful examples of Bresler's Fujicolor photographs shot through decorated window panes are currently on display at the Fletcher/Priest gallery. While thematically similar in intent, each of these 24x20-inch prints offers a unique experience that forces the viewer to examine what's in the frame. January 26, 1993 focuses on scraps of cut painted paper glued to a window, along with an old fan belt and some doll's feet. Viewers become so involved with the objects in the foreground that they nearly miss the fact that the apparently smooth background is, in reality, the angled brick walls and glass windows of buildings across the street. Bresler has managed to condense the entire scene into a flattened abstract composition of active lines and planes.

In Defying Gravity, 1994, she painted bright colored lines directly on window glass and pasted on a cut-out picture of a jet plane, making it appear as though the craft were flying dangerously low in the brick-walled canyon outside. Adding to the dreamlike quality of these works is the fact that her apartment window pane is so old that the glass is just wavy enough to distort our view of the otherwise angular buildings.

Bresler's window work underwent a serious shift when she moved to insect-ridden Somerville, in 1997, and for the first time in her life she had to contend with window screens. Looking out her windows became a digital experience -- scenes filled with minute lines and spaces, which reminded her of 19th-century stitchery. She capitalized on this effect by cutting out bits of wire screen, stitching them to a frame, and then placing the construction in her window before taking a photograph. The simplest example of this body of work is Meditation, 1997, in which she cut away an arrangement of small rectangles and squares and then focused in on the mesh, leaving the beige and iron-red rooftops across the way in soft focus. This same soft-focus roofline is recognizable in her much more complex composition, Perpetual Motion, 1999, but the swirls of screen circles, hexagons, birds, and threaded wire bits nearly obscure the tiny image of a man standing on the distant roof.

To help visitors understand her process, Bresler has included the actual framed screen through which she photographed Tempus Fugit, 1998. By making viewers concentrate on the elaborate compositions cut from or added to a simple mesh window screen, Bresler once again forces people to really look at her photographs, to take notice of the relationships between the indoor and outdoor landscapes. As she puts it, "People have become so used to seeing photography as a `re-presentation' of realism, they forget how much they look at and don't really see."

As an interesting sidelight, if you politely ask gallery owner Terri Priest, she will gladly show you five additional prints by Bresler that are not part of the exhibit. These transitional photographic experiments -- monochromatic extreme close-ups of dust, water, and glue on windows -- served as the bridge between her painted and papered NYC windows and the more recent cut-and-stitched screen images.

Through her "photography of invention" Bresler wants to tweak our brains a bit and make us "open our eyes and hearts," all the while warning us not to believe everything we see -- especially in a photograph.

The Fletcher/Priest Gallery is open on Wednesday and Thursday from noon to 6 p.m. or by appointment. Call (508) 791-5929.