| Introduction | 
FORT WORTH REVIEW Document/Image: The Work of Dan Allison William Campbell Contemporary Art , Reviewed by Tony Merino The human mind reads pictures as a mix of visual data-facts, and the product of fancy- fiction. These two qualities of images have a unique relationship because neither can exist in its pure state. The most random photQ still has some bias, some element in which the image is defined by what the photographer feels is important. Therefore it is somewhat fictional. Every image, even Kandinsky's most obtuse abstr.actions, in some way documents something, even if iv is an esoteric philosophy. Therefore, images are, in some part, documents of fact. Dan Allison explores this dichotomy of fact/fiction in
his recent exhibition, Searching. Each of his flowers and faux film noir
pieces play with how much of the image Allison documents and how much he
creates. The complexity of this dichotomy is immediately visible in his
floral pieces: large Orchid and 'smaller Rose images. Allison crops the
frame of the images so that only the swollen petals and sensuous profile
are legible. Thus the images become not so vague references to tonsils,
tongues, lips, labia and clitoris. This reference of flowers to flesh is
a common, almost hacneyed tradition of American art, typified in the work
of Robert Mapplethorpe and Georgia O'Keeffe.-One of Allison's greatest
strengths as an image-maker is his ability to make the trite look fresh
The documentary quality of the flower images is in direct contrast to the, artist's film stills images. In'these pieces the artist stacks fiction on fiction: or illusion on illusion. They pretend to be appropriated images of film noir stills, a highly stylized and mannerist form, which advertises its own artifice. Here, the artist illustrates stories from a fictional novel that he has apparently been writing. The composition of the images amplifies their fictionality. Tightly cropped portraits of women and men in broad brimmed hats appropriate the style and fashion of the period. As in film noir the absence of light becomes a positive element. The images are overlayed with fragments of illegible text. The images are links of narrative rather than full stories The action has just happened or more often, is just about to happen. Unlike the flower prints, Allison indulges in creating pure images. They celebrate their own artificiality. Courtesy of William Campbell Contemporary Art ARTL!ES Spring 2002
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In the case of the Orchids his work operates in the middle ground of document/image
that Mapplethorpe and O'Keeffe define. Mapplethorpe's flowers pretend to
be documents, presented in stark black and white. If there is any visual
allusion it is purely coincidental. O'Keeffe's pictures are definitely
images; she will alter the shape of a flower to more exactly mimic that
of a vagina.
His
Rose images deal with another aspect of how the human mind distinguishes
between document and image. Even more than the distinction between painting
and photography, the human mind, or at least the western mind, reads linear
pictures as documents and blurred pictures as imagery. An Audubon painting
is viewed as more real then a blurred photograph. Allison plays with this
construction in his prose pictures, which are both sharply defined and
hazy, coming in and out of focus. All of these images start as photographs,
as recordings of things that actually existed. No matter how much Allison
alters or distorts the image they retain some documentary element.