Free association?
Ian Green
Norma Drimmer’s photographs experiment formally with ideas of doubling, tripling, symmetry, and repetition. The series "Relationships of Beauty" features black and white, mystical landscapes with a snarling creature lording it at the top–all perfectly split down the middle and mirrored for abstraction, making them look subtly like Rorschach tests. That’s when the free associations start flowing.
Other works are brighter and crisper and so clearly what they are–fire, water, hair–that at first, speculation seems unnecessary. But their configuration in mirror-imaged doubles and suggestive threesomes is a signal to reconsider the significance of the materials in question.
Incorporating elements of Kabballistic and Biblical tradition with natural elements, Drimmer creates a synergy of earthly and mystical qualities by matching the spiritual implications of her interest with a firm tactile sense of immediacy and reality. By focusing on the straightforward realities of a subject, yet alluding to its more abstract meaning, Drimmer’s art is a space in which conflicting realities are blended, juxtaposed, and perhaps resolved.
Drimmer addresses this duality directly in the work In Visibility, in which hair, dyed black and bright orange, is braided and knotted and examined from many different angles, and mirrored many times. The braids–brown and fire-red–are pulled taut, the knots and twists dramatic and the color striking. The fine hair, so assertive and arresting, suggests strength and fragility in union, delicate beauty and taut potency in balance. There is a unification of perspectives displayed here. Hair itself is mundane–the dyed color obviously unnatural and braids more utilitarian than innately lovely. At the same time though, the hair is used here to express something deeper, more essentially human, and, in spite of the fabricated color and pragmatic knots, there is something natural and wonderful about that.
In her Fire Series, Drimmer cast her eye upon fire, significant in art and culture as an important religious, emotional, energetic, and destructive symbol. Drimmer’s surprising exploration–in this case in the form of individual areiel view close-ups of a bonfire–somehow casts a seemingly ordinary natural occurrence in a different, more speculative light. Drimmer sees fire as an essential component of life. It has the power to create and destroy; it helps society make things both beautiful and terrible. Fire represents the unification of existence’s many divergent aspects–life and death, beauty and ugliness, destruction and creation, power and tractability.
Drimmer’s pieces pay close attention to the visceral physicality of her subjects. In the Medusa Series, sand and blue bubbles are used to create a palpably textured plane. Whatever the more abstract implications may be, the work is grounded in the concrete senses of sight and touch. In Fire Series, while fire is mused upon with an eye toward spirituality, it too is seen as bound to the essential, physical components of its form. Often the focus is less on the fire than on the white and flaking wood that, while consumed by the fire, is also inextricably tied to it. Here, there is a sense that the subject exists on two planes simultaneously. It is material and "real," yet it is also something more than that, something vague and ephemeral, yet no less present.
Meanwhile, in Relationships of Beauty, we see murky grays and blacks that look as though they could perhaps be oil washing over stones. In the gloom, it’s hard to glean any meaning. Yet, eventually, something emerges and coalesces, again, almost like Rorschach tests that become suggestive, engrossing and strangely beautiful images. In the black murk there is something that both repulses and attracts, something inherently ugly and yet also pleasing. There is the superficially bleak image, itself; matched with the suggestion that there is an intangible kind of splendor in such bleakness, the suggestion that ugliness is its own sort of beauty.
Likewise, With Folded Hands challenges the viewer to discern meaning from an abstract mingling of light, dark, and natural elements. Beneath rippling water, organic, vaguely human forms are visible. The effect is at once confounding and engrossing, ethereal and sincerely human, once again revealing an interest in the tense union of ostensibly splintered aspects. Drimmer’s art seems to reflect the belief that life is an amalgam of differences, ugly/wonderful, abstract/physical, artificial/natural. Perhaps most importantly, in all of these works, Drimmer’s concern with tensions brings into focus what seems to be an overwhelming desire to unify aspects of the physical world with that of the spirit.
Some works deal indirectly with the realm of the soul. In that work, Drimmer’s knowledge of ancient Kabballistic imagery add depth to her artistic exploration of fire and it’s meaning. Concurrently, some of Drimmers work explores spirituality and faith in more explicit terms. Works such as Re-Generation and Solutions, for example, deal with Drimmer’s Jewish heritage in a much more direct way. Here, Drimmer’s art is informed by her own foundation and history. She approaches the subject of her own faith on levels spiritual, societal and historical, photographing the bust of Mendelssohn in the triptych Solutions. By referencing Mendelssohn, who in Jerusalem (1783) argued for the acceptance of a plurality of truths, Drimmer once again sets for herself the goal of coupling disparate realities. Furthermore, the artist’s insertion of her personal perspective and experience into her work reinforces the thrust of her aggregating quest. Every day we are called upon to play different roles, be different people, all at once. Drimmer recognizes the multiplicity of her own experiences and attempts to blend them, creating a sort of unified tapestry made up of distinct parts.
The triptychs of the Shechinah series both accelerates and diversify Drimmer’s characteristic pursuits: one features steamy clouds, a primordial landscape–or moonscape–is juxtaposed with a hand cutting open a red pepper. One is forced to make associations and invent connections: something primordially creative–though in the case of the pepper-cutting, also something very mundane–is going on in this triplet. In work #4 of this series a beautiful sparkling river is flanked incongruously on both sides by photos of a sewer cover. But is it really so incongruous? There is a strong, yet deficient relationship between the elements. This is what we wish the contents of the sewer will soon become. It’s the asymmetry of these triptychs which is perhaps most interesting: color connections or vague, hinted themes and spiritual associations are all we have to link the three unevenly arranged images, which are somehow both ruptured and united at the same time.
In Drimmer’s art, where faith, spirituality, history, nature and even the body share the same space, the aim is often integration–of natural bedfellows, such as nature and the spirit, as well as what at first seem uncomfortable comrades, like destruction and beauty. In recognizing the splinters in life experience, the divergences and contradictions, and surprising connections, Drimmer attempts to present a rich and dynamic portrait of existence, one that recognizes and appreciates fragments and differences, culls them together, and builds one coalescent vision. Nothing in life is ever as simple as it, at first, seems. And yet, everything is as it seems. Likewise, Drimmer’s art is, and is not, as straightforward as it might appear. Hair is hair, light is light, fire is fire, yet they are all much more than that as well.
