Light Touch Adds Emotional Weight
A review in The Boston Globe, May 13, 2005
By Cate McQuaid
As the light mellows at the end of the day, Vivian Pratt's digital prints on vellum at bf Annex are said to take on a kind of glow. There are technical reasons for that: Vellum is translucent, for one, and Pratt's beautiful images halo light with dark in a manner both serene and triumphant, regardless of the time of day. There's a poetic reason, as well: Pratt's subject is the dying of the light.
She photographs old, withering flowers and puckered petals that have already been shed. Then she takes her images to the computer, where she layers them, echoing leaf with leaf, stalk with stalk. In a series of pictures of yellow blossoms (they're all untitled), these can look like the layers of a gossamer skirt, floating on the breeze. Pratt fills the central image with light, and lets the reverberations of that image cushion the luminous center in soft shadow. The center, then, takes on a surprising vitality, despite its nearly papery, aged texture. Pratt offers a vital inner core that seems to burn even as the flesh dies away around it.
In another series, the artist homes in on pink petals, lying on a reflective surface. They, too, hold the light, cupping upward like fragile little vessels. Pratt's work, while technologically 21st-century, harks back to Victorian-era photography with its sentiment and almost gauzy appearance. Back then, soft focus denoted spirituality and ideals of romance and heroism connected to the spiritual life. Pratt's works are soft focus only in bits; they also have a shimmering clarity of focus, where she seems to limn the lit core of her works. If the medium is slightly different, the message of nobility in the face of struggle is the same.