Art | Starn brothers' long trail turns toward home

Twenty years ago and just two years out of art school, they dazzled visitors to the Whitney Museum Biennial as the Starn Twins. Today, Doug and Mike Starn, close artistic collaborators since they were teenagers in Absecon in South Jersey, prefer to be known as the Starn brothers, understandable given that they recently turned 46.

For someone who remembers their auspicious entry into the top tier of the American art world in 1987, it's satisfying to report that the twentysomething hotshots who made such a big noise with their large-scale, unconventional photographs have proved to be long-distance runners.

The proof is their exhibition at the Noyes Museum of Art in Oceanville, N.J., just a few miles north on Route 9 from where they grew up. In the two decades since they left Galloway Township for art school in Boston, the Starns have exhibited their work across the United States and around the world. And now here they are in what has become, ex post facto, their hometown museum.

The show, called "Sightings," consists of about 20 pieces that fill two of the museum's four galleries. That might not sound imposing, but some of these photographs, representing two thematic series, are very large; the biggest is 10 feet high by 21 feet wide. The ostensible subjects, trees and moths, are as familiar as day and night.

I qualify that statement because it's obvious that the Starns don't produce documentary nature photography. From their earliest efforts, they have addressed the nature of the medium itself.

The pictures in this exhibition, like their earlier work, subvert the idea of the technically perfect print several times over. Their prints are innovative in the ways they transform flat images into objects with distinctive material properties such as texture, depth and reflectivity.

Some pictures are composed like mosaics, of multiple sheets pinned directly to the wall. Tones often aren't consistent among neighboring sheets. The handmade papers on which the brothers print their images are often intentionally distressed - stained, creased or torn.

Some images in the moth series have been processed to resemble prints or fuzzy charcoal drawings. The tree images, different in character, are layered so that one's eye moves through as well as across them.

While in these two series the Starns are working directly from nature, they do so in a way that encourages viewers to think beyond the subjects - to ponder phenomena such as the effect of light on living things (moths) or different ways in which light creates matter (trees).

The moth series has been installed in the gallery closest to the museum entrance, so one is inclined to begin there. However, starting with the tree series, in the lower gallery, offers a slightly easier pathway into the Starns' universe.

The artists call the images of tree branches silhouetted against the sky "Structures of Thought." This means that the bold patterns of twisting and interlocking branches represent light transmuted from the ethereal into something concrete.

Yet the tracery is sometimes so intricate, perhaps because the artists have modified their camera images through digital recombination, that it can also suggest complex structures such as nerve networks.

This linking of organic structures is more than speculation. One of the more unusual images in this gallery is a narrow band that looks totally abstract. I thought initially that it might be a single tree replicated into a chain. But in fact it's an image of a human brain neuron, greatly enlarged. The tree pictures do more than emphasize the complexity of nature; through striking contrasts of light and dark they also remind us of how reality is defined by light and shadow.

The tree prints, inkjets on several types of handmade paper, are primal in this way. Layering with wax and varnish imparts translucent depth and tactility, which amplifies the visual power of the crisply silhouetted naked branches. These are intensely, romantically lyrical images and, as such, a considerable improvement on nature in the raw as one would see it through a viewfinder.

The moth pictures, called "Attracted to Light," are equally poetic, but in a different way. Here light is an active agency; the moths are drawn to light, and are consequently mesmerized (often fatally) by it. Using a combination of high-speed cameras and homemade lenses, the Starns capture the shimmering lepidopterans in extreme close-ups.

These aren't razor-sharp anatomical portraits. For one thing, like all the other pictures in the show, they're black-and-white, or black-white-and-gray. For another, they're sometimes blurry. You couldn't always identify the specimens from them, but you can be amazed by the monumental scale of moths that appear to be as large as vultures. In several prints the moths have been enlarged so many times that their bodies dissolve into pixels.

Light is a more pronounced presence in the moth pictures than in the trees. While it defines the insects, it also dissolves them into vaporous tonalities. I recall one picture in which the image seemed to be embedded in the paper, like strokes of charcoal, rather than being a film of pigment on the surface. When this happens, the moths appear less like living creatures than a convergence of shadows.

The moth pictures can be a bit spooky, especially the big bruiser that graces the gallery's end wall. Seen head-on, this moth resembles a bizarre creature from an alien planet. Yet one never forgets that it is only a magnified apparition that owes its startling appearance to light. Images such as this make one aware of the degree to which light, or its absence, defines experience.

If you haven't seen the Starns' work before, you might also take away a new appreciation of photography's potential for protean shifts in the way it functions as a medium.

The brothers revivify a historical period when photographers tried to make their work look like what then were more accepted art forms such as painting, drawing and printmaking. In achieving this, they also evoke a sense of fragility and transience - to wit, that photographs, like moths, are as much creatures of the dark as of the light.

"Sightings: Recent Works by Doug + Mike Starn" continues at the Noyes Museum of Art, 733 Lily Lake Rd., Oceanville, N.J., through Aug. 5. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and from noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission is $4 general and $3 for seniors and students. Information: 609-652-8848 or www.noyesmuseum.org.

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