Glimpses in Time, Joyce Gordon Gallery‘s annual international juried competition, returns. This year’s edition, curated by Bart Ross, honors San Francisco portraitist and nature photographer Imogen Cunningham, a founding member of f/64 and later a colleague of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Minor White at the Photography Department at the California School of Fine Arts. That school, now rebranded the San Francisco Art Institute, by a happy coincidence, is where Linda Connor, the show’s judge, now teaches. The 52 images she selected comprise portraiture, landscape, and abstraction, and range from demanding “straight” traditional photography to various types of digital magic.Among the posed portraits here are Adrienne V. Miller‘s “Mother and Child, Sikkim, India”; Sarah-Marie Land‘s wary schoolgirl, “Elizabeth”; and Walter Atkins‘ “Hadley Callman Quartet 2.” More opportunistic shots include Elise Tanner‘s playful girl/kitten duo, “Dana & Legos”; Harry Longstreet‘s young couple ensconced at a shadowy diner booth; Kyle Sharp‘s two boys, half-hidden and half-dressed, in “Untitled”; and the young woman in Anni Löppönen‘s “Untitled,” in classical repose on her unmade suburban bed. Contemporary landscapes include R. Parker Blackburn‘s “Keeper’s House,” anthropomorphic beneath its cirrus clouds; D.B. Stovall‘s “Hornell, New York,” with its insurance signage and alarmingly supersized clock; Richard Sargent‘s “Door, 2590 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley,” covered in torn, stained papers; Peter Takamori‘s “Fireball,” sizzling above city lights; Peter Dembinski‘s beautiful, ominous “Fire in the Sky, Detroit”; Nancy Duranteau‘s park bench overlooking billowing smokestacks in “Man vs. Nature: Untitled 1”; Eric Zeigler‘s powerful “School House” and “Cut Branches”; John Vias‘ abstract architectural study, “Windowed Wall”; Charles Byrne‘s enigmatic “Snow Pile, Parker CO” and “Snow Breeding Mount, Monument CO”; Donna J. Wan‘s gun emplacements at sunset, “On the Coast”; and Barbara B. Collins‘ “The Clinic/Alcatraz,” with its barred windows casting ghostly shadows.
More experimental are Ashley Eberlein‘s “On the Inside,” juxtaposing a woman’s breast and a sectioned fig; Jennifer Holmes‘ male nude climbing a bare tree in “Ascending a Crown of Thorns”; Vanessa Woods‘ collages of Greek statuary and reflections, “A Disturbance in Mirrors”; Terri Garland‘s “Delta Creation Theory” and Emily C-P Wang‘s “Untitled,” both employing triptych formats to expand time and space; and Jackson Patterson‘s “Dixie and Monument Valley” and Lacey Haslam‘s “Boy in Field” and “Brothers,” digitally setting historical images within bleak landscapes. Glimpses in Time: 2010 runs through July 30 at Joyce Gordon Gallery (406 14th St., Oakland). 510-465-8928 or JoyceGordonGallery.wordpress.com