Charles A. Hartman Fine Art

Sadly, of one of the best contemporary art exhibitions of 2008, Corey Arnold's wry and accurately titled FISH-WORK at Charles A.Hartman Fine Art ended during the blizzard last weekend. If you missed it PORT will try to make up the difference. Sure, we have seen Arnold's work in occasional group shows but this collection of images is particularly strong...and sometimes devastingly fresh.

Corey Arnold is learning to be comfortable in the art world. He’s had to, with shows opening in Portland this week and in New York in March.

But Arnold, a 32-year-old who moved to Portland last year, barely can keep himself away from the scene of his latest triumphs as a photographer, the icy and treacherous waters of the Bering Sea, where he spent six winters working aboard a commercial crab boat.

Curtaz draws with prickly precision and intention; this is not the loose-limbed spontaneity of artists wearing scarves in a cafe but more like the tense, fingers-clenched passion of the scientist wearing a lab coat.

That's a positive thing: Curtaz aims for a number of effects -- a mastery of line and optical illusion but also calculating objectivity. These works, with their almost sheen of porcelain slickness, recall everyone from Karl Blossfeldt's photographic botanical studies to the sensuousness -- albeit an emotionally closed-off kind of sensuousness -- of Philip Pearlstein's nude bodies.

Muybridge's bird in flight in "Plate 765" is particularly engrossing, perhaps because it reveals, and brings to earth, the mad flapping of wings that is not only often too quick for the human eye to see properly, but too high in the air for us to reach. At the same time, like most of Muybridge's "Animal Locomotion" pictures, it's documented not fancifully but scientifically, with the bird set against a plain graph-paper-like background.

Eadweard Muybridge understood that a single photograph was of little use when you are trying to understand the movement of an subject. Movement is inherently a function of moving through time and space. Muybridge's genius was that the even though a single photograph could only reveal a frozen moment in the movement of an object, a series of photographs are able to reveal a much more accurate description of movement. Even more important was that when the photographs were taken sequentially so the movement of the object can be observed changing frame by frame. I was surprised at the difficulty of thinking about some of the implications of Muybridge's experiments. You can see all of this for yourself if you look at the excellent show of Edward Muybridge collotypes at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art until August 30, 2008.

In Takahashi's photos, many of which resemble colorfield paintings, time moves slowly. The expanse is grand. Light is frequently imperceptible. The camera exposures are long. The conventions of theater and activity within a photograph, the photographer is telling us, are a secondary consideration.

Instead, Takahashi is more interested in articulating a kind of minimalist aesthetic, and most of all, expressing a state of mind. That state of mind builds with each photo: one by one, they gradually progress to a state of calm, studious inner grace, an almost Kierkegaardian, existential essence. You'll have to think and look deeply while experiencing these photographs.

The Siskind photos at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art this month are a baker's dozen of classic abstract images taken during the '40s, '50s and '60s -- the period that Siskind's photography formed into what critics see as his distinct style. Fragments of the urban landscape subtly imply the midcentury industrialization of American cities, while the poetic glimpses of arms, feet and other parts of the human anatomy distill, literally, Siskind's enduring fascination with form and people.

The tendency to separate Siskind's abstract work from his straightforward documentary work is understandable -- we achieve clarity through categories. But the two periods, or styles, are really the same: Siskind was always gripped by the enduring concerns of landscape and figure even as he chose to see this wide, strange world of ours through the smaller, detailed lens of abstraction.