Flesh and Bone

BERNICE FICEK-SWENSON creates rituals and then worships their details. A Minneapolis-based artist with a show at Jon Oulman Studio, Ficek-Swenson finds a quiet kind of reverence in the images of ash, stones, fire, and bone fragments, composed in arrangements that suggest prehistoric symbols. Grains of ash and scorch marks seep out from the paper, and the clean, smooth stones practically glow in their settings. And by employing photogravures--photographic images created by using emulsion on printing plates--Ficek-Swenson gives her work a textural, velvety finish different from that acquired through regular photo paper. (Viewers will need to look closely to notice this touch as the works are framed behind glass.)

The images may be lush, but they tell a story of visual simplicity. Cropped closely and viewed head-on, the symbols--a river of bone flowing into a reservoir of pebbles, a ring of stones inside a ring of ash--suggest a prehistoric communication predating writing, ideograms, and alphabets. It would, in fact, be easy to call her endeavor a slightly archeological one, and the viewer may fairly ask if the use of modern-day devices to record prefab primitivist images isn't a fetishizing act. While Ficek-Swenson's images capture the details of how we imagine rituals in stone and fire, they also run the risk of glamorizing those details while missing the culturally specific meanings behind them.

Luckily, Ficek-Swenson, 47, has learned how to get around the troublesome nature of the photographic image, not so much by explaining the specifics of her symbology as by modernizing its representation. Unlike our prehistoric ancestors, we are practically drowning in visual distillations of the world: The modern eye is surrounded by a torrent of symbols, from the red octagons of stop signs to the Nike swoosh. And by employing a rich tactility missing from TV commercials and the pages of Details, Ficek-Swenson creates visuals that belong to the 1990s industrialized West, not some other place or time. The attenuated grains of ash and flecks of bone are presented with a focus our day-to-day experience doesn't usually provide, and the resulting rarefying experience--known to LSD philosophers as the "Have you ever really looked at your hands?" phenomenon--suggests that the natural world is pregnant with meaning.

Which was perhaps the point of symbols in the first place--to build meaning out of stones--and Ficek-Swenson mimics that goal, creating modern-day icons in the process. To the artist, the content of the individual symbols matters: When we spoke, she reverently explained the historical import of the cross, the circle, and the square. But that kind of interest is hardly necessary for the viewer: This staunchly atheist critic, for one, wasn't engaged by the specifics of the belief as much as by the shape of its existence. It's a belief that suffuses every picture, one that argues for the spiritual value of icons in a time when they are more likely to represent the contents of a hard drive than the eyes of God.

PAINTER THERESA Handy also traffics in the intimacy of the natural world. But where Ficek-Swenson, the photogravurist, soaks her pieces in detail, this 27-year-old painter, who lives and works in St. Paul and is also involved with No Name Exhibitions, simplifies to hypnotic effect. Take "The Sleeping Forest," in which a field of black lies under a field of white, with a scraped, heavily worked texture hinting at endless layers of obscured trees and clouds. Or the singular "The Light from Behind," in which a slowly narrowing gash of yellow-orange dusk light wedges into a sea of black, spanned by backlit tree trunks. Odd elements tease the construction of space: Despite the canopy of trees blocking out the sky, the visible trunks are thin, and none seems close enough to suggest immersion in a forest. And then there's that inexplicable umber glow, which should illuminate some of the black background into discernible shapes but instead only suffuses the scene in an illegible haze. Yet the illusion maintains itself due to the resonance of Handy's imagery and the suggestiveness of pitch black; this flattened space still manages to envelop the viewer.

That sense of immersion is constant throughout Handy's work, and it can sometimes seem too intimate. Hence the gorgeous foreboding of "The Light from Behind," which seems to be hiding whatever the sunset (or sunrise) will bring. Or the use of antique photos in a few paintings, where water-thin layers of oil paint overlap the edges of the photos and threaten to swallow up the figures themselves. In a way, those figures work as stand-ins for viewers lost in Handy's tranquil spaces. In her work, the landscape is a mood, not a place, and leaving may not be as easy as it looks.

Bernice Ficek-Swenson's work is on exhibit at the Jon Oulman Studio through February 21; call 333-2386. Theresa Handy's work shows at the Kellie Rae Theiss Gallery through February 21; call 339-1094.