BACK IN THE 1970s, photographer Christopher Burkett was a monk ministering to the freaked out in Haight-Ashbury. These were the days when flower children by the hundreds poured into San Francisco. Bedeviled by drug use and empty pockets, many of them became desperate street kids. Gallery owner Terry Etherton, who lived in the Bay Area then, remembers the robed monks of Burkett's order searching them out on sordid sidewalks and at claustrophobic concerts. The monks thought of these acid-tripping panhandlers as children of God, souls sorely in need of physical and spiritual succor.
In 1979, Burkett plucked his own soul out of that urban hellhole. He transplanted himself to rural Oregon, married and turned to a photography that seeks the sacred not in human despair but in the glories of unspoiled nature. Etherton, who says he probably used to see Burkett in the Haight, is showing 19 of the photographer's gigantic color landscape photographs in his downtown gallery. It's the second Etherton show for Burkett, whom Etherton calls one of the greatest photographic printers around.
Certainly Burkett's vivid prints are astonishing, recording in sumptuous detail the rippling texture of a tree trunk, the crevices in a canyon's rock wall, the feathery tendrils of a cottonwood tree. And the colors in such works as "Silver Maple and Rock Wall, Virginia, 1987," all silvery white trunks, deep blue rocks and flame leaves, are so glorious and painterly that they seem fake, the work of the artist's own hand.
But even more interesting than his tour-de-force technical skill is Burkett's untrendy subject, what he himself calls the "world untouched and undefiled by man." He's traveled the country in recent years, documenting the pink and white dogwoods of Kentucky, the leaves floating on a New Jersey river, the sunrise in a Virginia forest, as well as the familiar golden canyons of the West. Burkett's aiming at something more profound than mere representations of nature's beauties, though. He invests his intimate landscapes with a deeply felt spirituality. Like the Romantic poets, like the Transcendentalists, the monk-turned-artist finds God in nature.
And what's striking about his photographic takes on creation is just how dense, almost claustrophobic, they are. These are curiously flat landscapes, nature pictures without sky, without horizons, without long views. Burkett's thick forests block out the heavens, and their tangled underbrush eliminates the impression of depth. In "Aspen Grove, Colorado, 1993" a row of glistening white tree trunks march across the paper, enveloped in a cloud of golden leaves that offer no exit.
You might expect this in pictures of a forest, but even Burkett's mountain views shun the proverbial wide open spaces. "Canyon of the Rio Grande, New Mexico, 1984" shows the shimmering river snaking around the buttes, but Burkett has angled his camera so that there is no sky. Instead of the characteristic emptiness of the western landscape, every iota of space is filled, with a tree, a shrub, a rock.
It may be that living in the forests of Oregon has made Burkett most comfortable in the shelter of a tree. Or perhaps as a refugee from the crowded Haight he tends to fashion views of nature as dense as a city. Most likely, making art that offers a total immersion in the all-embracing landscape, art that portrays "each living cell, every stone and drop of water" is the closest Burkett gets to the divine.
If Burkett is out to celebrate nature as he finds it, Tucsonan William Lesch is not. Lesch, who's exhibiting nine color photographs, alters the found landscape by "painting" rocks and cactuses with stage lights. His surrealistic photographs of gleaming purple saguaros and iridescent purple prickly pears are getting a bit too familiar though. Fans of this style are legion, but it may be time for Lesch to move on to something different.
The third artist in the show is even farther than Lesch from Burkett's sacred nature, perhaps about as far as a person could get. Tucsonan Jeffrey Jonczyck, a graphic designer by trade, has put together mixed media works fashioned of rough materials--plywood, crayon and acrylics--that play with the artificial shapes of architecture. In paintings that are more about humans than God, he plies a cheerful urban idiom of spires and scrawls, unnatural pastel colors and 3-D building blocks. His version of nature, "Watching the Shooting Stars," has a lot more to do with toy rockets and a child's view of outer space than it does with the holy heavens. The four-panel work "Contradicting the Language" uses graffiti, TV logos and distorted football shapes, perhaps to question linguistic convention.
But unlike Burkett, Jonczyck doesn't have solemn intentions. And where Burkett's carefully composed photographs work hard to seek out transcendence, as hard, let's say, as a brother laboring under the monastic rule, Jonczyck's serendipitous creations seem surprised by joy.
Works by Christopher Burkett, William Lesch and Jeffrey Jonczyck continue though Saturday, March 25, at Etherton Gallery, 135 S. Sixth Ave. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 7 p.m. Thursdays, and 7 to 10 p.m. on Downtown Saturday Nights, including this week, March 18. For more information call 624-7370.
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