Wall to Wall Fun, the new show by Island artist L.A. Brown at the Old Sculpin Gallery in Edgartown, is filled with photographs that draw the viewer in — and further in — until the gallery walls around them all but disappear.
Crashing surf, sweeping Martha’s Vineyard landscapes and beckoning sights through seaside windows are among the compelling images in the exhibition, on display through August 29.
“My viewer immediately goes somewhere, in their mind and their heart and their head,” Ms. Brown said.
That’s why she declines to identify the unnamed locations of photographs like Light on Shingles and Window Wonder Two, with their eye-inviting glimpses through glass panes.
“I like that feeling of the individual being able to own where they went in their head, that’s not attached to me,” Ms. Brown said.
“It’s lovely, and they own it, and that’s what I like. I would rather have them just keep being in that other place.”
Ms. Brown’s newest works in this mode, Beyond the Beyond and Way Beyond, are among the most arresting in the show, with their seductive frame-within-frame views of sunny coastal landscapes through the interior of a wooden house with bare openings where windows used to be.
Not only does the location of these shoots remain a secret — unless someone guesses, in which case she said she’ll confirm or deny — but the structure itself no longer exists.
“It’s torn down,” said Ms. Brown, who captured the first two images on separate trips to the house without realizing its days were numbered.
On her third trip, she said, it was gone.
“My heart was broken. Every time you go to photograph something, it has different light and different feelings.
“I can’t ever photograph it again.”
Ms. Brown makes no secret of the locations in other photos, such as the breathtaking Katama Puddles and South Beach Soft, two views in which the sweep of nature seems to crest over human habitations like a great wave.
Wall to Wall Fun also includes several images from a series paying tribute to Ms. Brown’s former Edgartown landlady and neighbor Mary Drake Coles, a longtime Old Sculpin painter who died in 1998.
The two became friends and Ms. Brown still has one of Ms. Cole’s chairs, a gift from the older artist’s family after her death.
In her Mary’s Chair photographs, Ms. Brown has photographed the worn wooden side chair on the jetty at Menemsha, the Oak Bluffs seawall, next to a fluted column on the front porch of a white-painted house and elsewhere around the Island.
A wintry pair of images shows the chair with its legs in snow and in ice. The effect in each shot is one of presence in absence: the chair is empty, but it is still Mary’s chair.
One thing all of Ms. Brown’s photographs have in common is that they go from camera to gallery wall with no post-production.
“I don’t doctor up my photographs,” she said. “I don’t want to have images that I have to go over a second time in the computer. If I didn’t shoot it right the first time, in the camera, it doesn’t go in front of my eyes again.”
Wall to Wall Fun is on display at the Old Sculpin Gallery through August 29: Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. More images and information are posted on Ms. Brown’s website, labphoto.com. The gallery website is oldsculpingallery.org.
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