Gary Duehr

These images explore the wounds and amputations inflicted on classic Roman and Greek statuary in museums. Some of the damage is obvious, such as a missing limb or blinded eye. Some of it mars the surface of a torso or spine. And some of it apears mechanical, such as the hole of a missing post.

The statues appear to be survivors of war and personal strife. They become empathetic figures, speaking across time of the trials of being human and of being a civilian or warrior caught up in armed conflict.

Full of feeling, mute, the statues balance suffering with a certain dignity.

On these embroidered linen pillows, questions arise about the nature of sleep and the quality of solitude:

- Whose Shadow Has Trailed You Home?
- Why Is Sleep Still Here?
- Which House, Silent, Surrounds You?
- Who Listens For The Faintest Echo?
- What Is The Dark Jealous Of?
- When Does The Day Turn Away?
- How Many Nights Refuse To Answer You?
- In The Early Hours, What Lies Ahead?
- What Remains, What Goes, What Eludes Us?
- Between What's Known And Not, How To Act? 
- Which Flaws May Come To Light?

Gray thread embroidered on gray linen, 12" x 16" x 5".

"Hazards of Modern Living" comments on the culture of fear in the post-9/11 era. At times absurd or chilling, the signs caution us to avoid dangers such as lightning, falling planes, and drowning—as well as apparently innocuous objects like forks, clocks and sad books.

At the center, suffering all these fates, is a stoic, Buster Keaton-like Everyman, familiar from Men’s Room signs. Blank, expressionless, he is restricted to several poses: flailing, running, and sitting or standing unawares.

Printed on aluminum, these industrial-like hazard signs warn us to be careful of almost everything.

Get the most out of your public messages! Display these bold signs proudly on your wall, in the yard, or indoors as a stand-alone piece of verbal sculpture.

Are the messages in FLASH BANG warnings or helpful directions? An anonymous cultural critique or distillation of violence? Should we head toward them or run away?

These eye-catching yellow-and-black signs on sturdy corrugated plastic hold up in all kinds of weather.

Double-sided, with messages that flip on the reverse side, FLASH BANG signs may be mounted on the wall, displayed in the yard using a 3'-high metal stand that inserts in the ground, or this stand may be used indoors with a custom aluminum base. (12 "x 2" x .75").

These extended-frame color photographs try to capture the liminal moments between things. There's a feeling that narrative is suspended, that something has just happened or is about to.

A door is partway open, the back of a head is glimpsed in a hallway, two figures in a car are seen on their way to places unknown.

Seen another way, "Liminalities" captures the detritus of cultural overflow. These found images suggest our cultural preoccupations. A short list might include cars, beds, and big windows, occupied by concerned-looking couples or loners.

Derived from satellite imagery, "MapScapes" explores the boundary between mapmaking and landscape photography. Gaps and jagged edges come into play where surveillance technology breaks down.

Familiar terrain can be seen such as streets and bridges, as well as map icons—a red bed for a motel, a knife and fork for a restaurant, a camera for a scenic spot. These two modes interact to create visual tension.

"MapScapes" addresses how we perceive the world, how we make sense of it, and how we try to bring it under our control.

Look up, if you dare, and everything converges: skyscrapers, traffic signals, power lines, flags. A brilliant sun lights up a vast blue sky, cut up into awkward slices and jigsaw pieces.

The view is the diametrical opposite of bird's-eye, perhaps ant's-eye or at least pedestrian's-eye. Over our heads the world revolves around our singular vision, but we are pretty small and insignificant.

Does glancing up steeply invoke the same vertigo as peering over the edge of a rooftop? It may be that we are already falling and just don't know it yet.

In these images taken from a car at twilight, the auto functions as a kind of camera obscura: focusing through the windshield, framing the shots with the steering wheel, letting the car’s speed act as a slow-motion aperture.

Houses and bridges slide by, and telephone poles and traffic lights become monumental against an intense cyan or purple sky. What is usually glimpsed from the corner of they eye becomes the subject, a rush of barely registered perceptions in the hurried pace at the end of the day.

In these photos, the roof-shapes of houses loom large against a blue expanse of sky. They are tethered by power lines and thrown into deep shadows.

Instead of offering shelter, these dwellings teeter on the edge, glimpsed in the unreal palette of cyan and a coppery green. Each house stands singular, alone, a place less of comfort than of alienation.

The six-paneled images in "Interstices" capture impressions of the city at night. They focus on the blank spaces, the intervals, between buildings and branches, traffic signals and medians, flags and electrical cables.

In these photographs, things are on the verge of vanishing.

A looming skyscraper, a construction crane, a lit-up bus, a passerby caught in a crosswalk. The street becomes an arena of shifting views. The familiar shimmers, trembles, and becomes almost unrecognizable.

From below the sheen of the aluminum surface, the black pigment breaks and dissolves. The city at night becomes a mirror, a mirage.

The images in "Interstices" capture impressions of the city at night. They focus on the blank spaces between buildings and branches, traffic signals and medians, flags and electrical cables.

In these photographs, things are on the verge of vanishing.

A looming skyscraper, a construction crane, a lit-up bus, a passerby caught in a crosswalk. The street becomes an arena of shifting views. The familiar shimmers, trembles, and becomes almost unrecognizable.

From below the sheen of the aluminum surface, the black pigment breaks and dissolves.

The city at night becomes a mirror, a mirage.

Printed as black on aluminum using an anodized process, "Car Obscura" explores the car as a picture-making device, much like a camera obscura. Taken at dusk while driving, and using the windshieldas the lens, these images provide blurry glimpses of bridges and billboards, stretches of highway and streaks of street lights.

Some of the photographs are abstracted through rain splatters on the windshield or the interruption of the steering wheel's arc; others suggest a narrative when a lit-up house floats by or another car is sighted in the rear view mirror.

They focus on how isolating driving can be, while the outside world is experienced as a shifting array of projections.

Anodized aluminum, 20" x 20".

The ambiguous territory of modern airports represents a kind of limbo neither here nor there.

The runways' vast expanse is interrupted by mysterious signals and markers, as well as by circus-like caravans of luggage carts. The noses of planes loom against plate glass, which reflects the ubiquitous neon of fast food and luxury shops.

And passengers wait in anonymous gray-carpeted holding areas, surrounded by aluminum panels--as if the whole edifice might suddenly take off.

What does it mean to be nowhere? How does passing through No Man's Land add to an anxiety of displacement, as well as suggest possible escape?

Based on closed circuit television (CCTV) from anonymous global sources, "Closed Circuit" examines the ubiquitous state of Big Brother's watchful eye.

Just as the footage—taken from hotels and airports and parking lots and elevators—possesses an air of anonymity, so do the subjects, who are reduced to faceless projections. The closer the CCTV zooms in, the less concrete information remains. Shadowy bodies float through glaring spaces: they could be anyone doing anything, any where at any time.

Yet the very process of singling them out, sometimes with a red target for emphasis, gives their mundane behavior a sinister tint. Recorded, ID'd, processed. tagged. Who can keep their heads above the deluge?

This autobiographical series is a tribute to my father, who ran a parking lot for most of his life.

The images are of a sculptural glass model, based on his parking lot booth, which I photographed in various times of day and situations, including parking lots. 

Available as a hardback book, 20 pages, 7x7”, $38.99 plus shipping from Blurb. Click here to order.

In this autobiographical fiction, the cracks in the glass interrupting faces and bodies are real, just not actual.

That is, they are trompe l'oeil photographic representations of fractures, embedded in the pictures themselves--which are displayed in Florentine, 8x10-inch gold frames under intact sheets of glass.

Are they fissures in memory, or in the family itself? How much can be recovered from collective storytelling that's been shaded over the years?

A younger sister barely appears at the edges. Brothers stand in for each other. Mom and dad hover just out of sight and reach.

This family album is meant as a Rorschach test for viewers; it is up to them to decide how comic or tragic, poignant or ridiculous these poses and empty spaces are.

Inspired by gyotaku, traditional Japanese fish prints, these monoprints are rubbings from everyday objects: a shirt, a chair, a pillow.

Gyotaku (gyo from "fish" and taku from "rubbing") is a form of 19th-century nature printing used by fishermen to record their catches. To make a print, they place the subject (fish, crab or scallop shell) on a wooden bench, then brush one side with sumi ink. Next a piece of paper is laid over the ink-covered fish, and the paper is rubbed until the image appears.

For these contemporary prints, paint has been applied to the object, which is then pressed onto on a variety of substrata including roofing paper and watercolor paper. I think of the images as a kind of photograph: directly recording an object, much as a photogram does, to evoke a real thing.

Culled from stock photos, these images show a cross-section of an idealized America. A place where doctors and firefighters and soldiers all do their jobs with devotion.

But look closer and you notice a certain isolation and weariness too. As if everyone needs a moment to "take stock" of what they're doing and why.

This is an America still trapped in the false dreams of the Bush era, but showing signs of wear and tear in the Balkanized political present. Many of the subjects gaze directly back at us, as if from a mirror. As if to say: I am he as you are he as you are me (Walt Whitman via John Lennon).

Taken at night, in a dense neighborhood of three-deckers and chainlink fences, these images look upward, seeking out the empty spaces between rooftops, between bare branches and power lines.

"House Sky" evokes the simple, delicate strokes of Japanese woodcuts.

In some images, electrical cables appear to be dragging the peak of a house, as if it were almost airborne. In others, the parallel lines of cables play against the branches' lacework, like a musical score.

Fashioned from sandblasted glass, they are photographs on the verge of vanishing, white-on-clear traces illuminated only by texture.

Sandblasted glass in shadowbox, 12" x 12", 2010.

These candid iPhone photos grab people on the street, caught up in their own mini-dramas.

Lost in thought, hurrying along, or talking on their phones, they reveal expressions that range from tense to dreamy. They are alone in the middle of a crowded city.

Sunlight slices across a corner or crosswalk, putting a spotlight on them in the middle of the pavement. Or else they shoulder their way down a busy sidewalk. Once in a while the subject catches the camera's eye, drawing you into the scene.

And then the figures vanish, a momentary vision that flashes past the corner of your eye.