Fatal shots

Gary Higgins reflects on death and dying

by Leon Nigrosh

WHERE THE ROAD FORKS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY GARY HIGGINS At the George C. Gordon Library, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 100 Institute Road, through June 5.

Upon entering the gallery space in the WPI Gordon Library, I was immediately drawn to Gary Higgins's photo montages for their deep colors and liquid shapes. As I got closer to each 20x24-inch work, the forms became more discernible. Slowly it dawned on me that I was looking at compositions constructed from x-rays, CAT scans, bones, viscera, and cadavers -- pictures of dead people.

Over the centuries, many artists have tried to make people acknowledge the dark side of life. In 1510 Hieronymus Boch took us through his Garden of Delights straight down into the mouth of Hell. During the 1950s, British Expressionist painter Francis Bacon confronted us with sides of flayed beef and screaming eyeless figures. More recently, even Andy Warhol attempted to arouse our morbid instincts with his repetitious screen prints of electric chairs and gruesome automobile crashes. Naturally, people deny any interest in such macabre images, but who among us has not slowed to glance at the sight of a highway accident?

Higgins is showing us that though we might prefer to think of our own world as a bright and happy place, this is the way it really is. Yet, unlike his predecessors, there is a gentle kindness present throughout his images. He is not out to shock and repel us, rather he is attempting to reveal that there can be beauty even in death -- which is just an inevitable part of life.

In his most benign work, Learning Curve, we see a photo portrait of the artist as a youngster, taken by his uncle in Yonkers. The cranial CAT scans superimposed on the lower edge of this image immediately separate it from the usual family-album shot. Because Higgins has filtered out every color but red, the image is suffused with an ominous air of foreboding.

Higgins's predominantly orange Caretaker takes us on a deeper exploration into the concept of life's fragility. The rhythmically balanced composition consists of three consecutive film negatives of a woman which diagonally overlay a photograph of a smiling tot and her doll seated on a lawn chair. This joy-filled image is positioned just below a picture of a child on a morgue slab. When the reality of these images finally registers, the serene aspect first evoked by this work dissolves in a flurry of questions. Who is the woman? Is the youngster in both pictures the same? What happened to the child? Why?

His thought-provoking photo assemblages serve to stimulate conversation about the ambivalent attitude we have toward death and dying. Although some viewers might be repulsed by the pictures of gashed and broken bodies, which play a role in the otherwise tranquil Chapters of Theresa, Higgins notes that many models found in soft porn magazines are often shown posing in identical positions.

Through Higgins's adept handling of his materials and techniques, a simple direct mail advertisement for a medical dictionary takes on the visage of the devil himself in What Does God Mean? The same skills in darkroom cross-processing also went into the his more complex configuration The Killing Wisdom in which three bears on a child's plate shimmer in rainbow colors. When conjoined with a palmistry hand and a daguerreotype of a small girl, the once innocent platter becomes a bizarre and sinister mandala.

Whether it is Higgins's information-laden panel from his series The Book of Days, filled with reproductions of old family photographs and a cadaver, or his starkly simple Nurturer with its desiccated Mexican bat juxtaposed on a chest x-ray, each of these photo montages is charged with high emotion. Our society prefers to dismiss the fact that every single thing living will reach its inevitable demise. Higgins invites us to take another look at this situation from a more enlightened direction. Higgins's work, with all its symbolism, serves as memento mori -- objects which remind us of death -- but richly rendered in lyrical and poignant metaphor.

The Gordon Library is open Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call 831-5410.