John Stezaker Demands Our Attention in "Orderly Chaos" at Gray | Newcity Art

In the current exhibition at Gray, British artist John Stezaker turns the world on its head, literally. His collages are sometimes vertiginous, sometimes startling, always fascinating, and in our political climate, remarkably prescient. Stezaker, who works in series, has sourced his material for this body of work, titled "Raft," from nineteenth-century British books in his extraordinary archive. For almost sixty years, he has collected and worked with vintage materials from various printed sources, in this case, the Victorian period in the U.K. The pieces are small and jewel-like, mounted and simply but perfectly framed in narrow black, reminiscent of cases used by jewelers to display their most priceless gems. That is not to say that this work is precious -- it has a great deal of weight and meaning. Stezaker imbues each piece with a complete story which may read differently to each viewer, but this is not work to glance at and walk on, it's fully engaging and each mystery demands our full attention.

The images, in their original book form, conveyed pastoral beauty and the tidy ideals of towns, cities, bridges and the sea. Stezaker cuts and pairs them, creating a false and intriguing new "horizon" line, and placing one right side up and the other upside down, constructs fantastical, dreamlike landscapes. For example, in one piece, a hillside town is matched to a cathedral, reversed on the bottom so that it appears to be a mass of stalactites or the roots of an ancient tree, growing beneath the ground as if supporting the village from below. In another, buildings line a bridge similar to Florence's Ponte Vecchio, but reversed over the heads of the pedestrians on the bridge are two wide streets with their own buildings. The two sets of buildings merge into a single city block, an Escher-like trompe l'oeil. As you study the piece more closely, you realize that half of the buildings are actually upside down, but the grids of windows provide a sense of normalcy.

In many of the pieces, it's all but impossible to make out exactly where Stezaker has seamlessly joined the two pieces together, adding to the surreal perplexity the work creates. Some have roads that come from or go to nowhere, or reflections in water that look nothing like what is on the land. In one, a group of men on hands and knees appear to be repairing or spreading out rugs on the ground before a river that seems to be held back by a weak wooden dam. It is this sense of impending doom that gives some of Stezaker's work its power. In a wonderful piece, aptly titled "Underworld," Victorians stroll along a wide pier, while overhead, a boardwalk is cluttered with people -- the edge of the upper ocean crosses on a diagonal, meeting the edge of the lower pier in a trick of perspective. Nothing is what it seems in this beguiling exhibition, but each and every piece is a nod to the brilliance of its creator.

John Stezaker "Raft" at Gray, 2044 West Carroll through June 13