Through Jan. 8

We got to know Lorna Bieber, through a good friend, her brother David, who handles special projects for the Phoenix and WFNX and is avid collector of pop culture artifacts. His home doubles as a private museum - comic books, vintage radios, records, consumer products. (Neither Bieber is related to Justin; Bieber actually used to be a fairly obscure name until the kid from Canada.) Lorna collects stuff too, but does things a little more public with them. Back in the '90s, we took a tour of Lorna's home/studio in New York and was very impressed with collages, photos and montages. Now, Bieber has an exhibit, "Narratives," up at the Addiston Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover through Jan. 8.

    Composed of mundane even generic imagesm Bieber’s works are both ambitious and transcendent. For the past 30 years, she has used found images and stock photographs as the raw material for her art. In creating large-scale photographs and wall-sized montages, she begins with ordinary pictures and illustrations found in books, newspapers, and magazines. These appropriated images are then re-interpreted through a range of manipulations that includes photocopying, enlarging, reducing, cropping, enhancing, and ultimately re-photographing. Teasing out unnoticed and humdrum details from ordinary images and collaging fragmented tidbits culled from everyday pictures, the artist spins complex and ethereal worlds out of decidedly simple and earthbound elements. Likening her photography to alchemy, she says, “By altering the ‘root picture’ in these ways, I can create new branches whose narratives are utterly different from the original, bringing the observer to see the world in dramatically unexpected ways.” It makes us think of art the way the Residents make us think of music.

Born out of the world of photographic reproduction and comprised of pictures of pictures, Bieber’s photo murals and montages are far removed from the natural world they depict. Divorced from their original contexts and blurred and distorted by her multiple alterations, these haunting, shadowy images exude visual mystery. Like a distant memory or a dream that fades upon waking, the images are elusive. All enveloping, moving in and out of focus, and shifting in scale, they threaten to dissolve at any moment. Yet, as much as these images offer entry into parallel otherworldly places, there is part of us that stubbornly persists in reading these abstracted images of dogs, trees, and mountains as relics of the real world as we cling to our convictions that photographs by their very nature are concrete documents representing specific objects in actual time and space. The play between these two readings is further compounded in the montages: while their gridded formats suggest the possibility of a continuous narrative, the fractured glimpses of nature contained in each image and their non-linear sequencing deny such a reading.  It is the tension between reality and fantasy, representation and abstraction, physical presence and intangibility, specificity and ambiguity, which imbues Bieber’s work with such power.

In 2009 the Addison invited Bieber to be the Addison’s Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence. For her residency project, Bieber collaborated with several photography, portfolio, and humanities classes at the Performing and Fine Arts Academy at Lawrence High School. This extended project involved repeated visits to the school throughout the spring semester during which she introduced students to her work and shared her artistic process and creative vision. Inspired by the artist’s presence, and engaged with her murals and montages (one of which was temporarily installed in the school), students then created their own works that similarly challenged the traditional definitions of photography. With the use of a scanner and photocopier, the students enlarged, shrunk, layered, and combined their own photographs and those taken by others to create unique installations. Bieber provided individualized critiques to every student as his/her work developed, all the while encouraging them to expand their notions about art making. The results—a remarkable variety of truly original and innovative works—were then exhibited in places of prominence throughout Lawrence High School where they further inspired students, teachers, and visitors.

Just as Bieber made a strong impact on the students, they in turn influenced her. She has described how enlightening it was to see her ideas and the techniques she has long been using adopted by others and then expanded, contracted, de-constructed, and re-constructed. Having the opportunity to consider her process and her work through the eyes of others has led to radical changes to her montages. For example she credits her interactions with students for recently breaking out of her usual rectangular format to create a heroically-scaled and irregularly-shaped work that explores iconic Christian imagery. In addition she has several ideas for new pieces that she says are directly inspired by the Lawrence students’ work. According to Bieber, “They drew me out into their world and as a result, myvision expanded.”

Both talk and exhibit are free. Hours: 10-5 Tues.-Sat, 1-5 Sun.

Corner of Route 28 (Main Street) and Chapel Ave. Andover, 978-749-4015 www.andover.edu/addison