Zero gravity

Matt Harnett floats free

by Christopher Millis

"REFLECTIONS: A CELEBRATION OF THE CAMBODIAN/AMERICAN EXPERIENCE" At the Brush Art Gallery and Studios, 256 Market Street, Lowell, through June 20.

Do not be deceived by the quaint, 19th-century candy-store quality of the Brush Art Gallery inLowell. For all that this modest showcase occupies one of the neatly refurbished spaces in the basement of an old brick mill about 40 miles north of Worcester, and for all that its atmosphere is small-town friendly (no admission cost and a staff so accommodating it seems lifted from a Frank Capra movie), there the quaintness ends. To assume the Brush's lack of pretense casts it in the pathetic tradition of most suburban art venues -- glass by the ladies, harbor paintings by the gentlemen -- would be an injustice. In fact, the current exhibit of photographs by Matt Harnett qualifies as one of the most startling, unsettling, and accomplished shows you'll see anywhere.

What Harnett has done over the course of some three dozen immaculately rendered black-and-white images (the show also includes an installation by Mia Wood and a photographic essay by James Higgins and Joan Ross) is to capture the daily life of children whose only home is the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. With a sense of composition that stays formal without ever becoming overbearing, Harnett provides a look at lives so impoverished, so seasoned by hunger and despair, and at the same time so fully lived -- without a trace of the narcotized consciousness of television cultures -- that you're left both humbled and stunned by these strangely ancient children.

Harnett knows precisely how near or how far to position himself from his subjects. The result is that his photographs read with devastating articulation and clarity. A group of boys, six in all (much as one shirks from counting), ages perhaps eight to 16, sleep outdoors in a pit lined with cardboard. Legs akimbo, mouths open, they sleep fully dressed and attached to each other like a circle of crudely cut paper dolls

Harnett's insight is to shoot them from only a few feet above, thereby permitting us to see them as simultaneously unreal and real, as a design imposed by the artist's perspective but also as flesh and blood. The boys register either as an abstraction -- a Third World ghetto's June Taylor Dancers -- or as inescapably human and particular. We're close enough to feel the heat they generate, the breath of their sighs.

Harnett is no less skilled at distance -- in fact, he may even be more skilled. It's almost impossible to make things we can't see resonate with the same profundity as those that we can, but Harnett pulls it off. The artist reminds us, for instance, that maintaining one's distance is frequently a form of respect. The child whose lower teeth make him resemble the Wolf Man is shot yards away, and then behind a veil of smoke from the cigarette he's puffing. The mother holding a malnourished, naked child is seen as if through an inverted telescope as she talks to a man in a wheelchair who has no legs.

More haunting than the images of unspeakable hardship are the images that purport to show no hardship at all: the boys sniffing glue as offhandedly as executives hitting back the night's first martini; the just barely post-pubescent prostitutes seductively draped over rusting beds. And it's in these pictures of unselfconscious yet merciless pain, with their casual violence and complete resignation, that Harnett confronts us with the meaning of our own ability to cry. He's suggesting to us that empathy itself is an indulgence of the privileged.