Minding the Gap

Americans don’t have much interest in symbolism beyond, say, status symbols and the tried-and-true devices of advertising. It’s just not our thing. When it comes to politics—a topic that permeates the work of photographer Sean Smuda—we’re downright averse to things that represent other things. A donkey and an elephant will do.

Smuda’s new show Dreams and Allegories, at Flanders Contemporary Art, barrels headlong into this culturally fraught territory with elaborately conceived and crafted photographs that brim with symbolic interactions. Populated by characters in all sorts of states—repose, bewilderment, fear, agitation, obliviousness—Smuda’s photographs act more like set pieces—what he describes as a “fantastic theater of moral ambiguity and contemplation.”

Smuda’s talent for creating images that evoke complex reactions comes through in Immaculate Conception, a piece that uses a Bible story to create a visual narrative about race, gender, and reproductive rights. He recasts the manger scene in a residential garage complete with a pregnant Mary holding The Club antitheft device and a dazed-looking Joseph sitting on the edge of a hay-filled car trunk. Both Mary and Joseph are Caucasian; an African-American baby girl sits on Joseph’s lap.

The piece equates Mary’s right to control her body with the mundane property rights with which we can all identify, in the process re-imagining reality using symbols and themes culled from everyday experience. “[It’s] Roe v. Wade meets car theft and the mystery of the Other,” says Smuda. “Ultimately, it’s about the gap between the conceptual and the actual, our willingness to try to understand and let others have free will. I also thought that having a manger scene in my trunk might stop the break-ins.”

Bible stories and babies are only two of the subjects Smuda explores. The photographer takes on some other big themes—weapons of mass destruction and oil dependence, for instance—and manages to render them specific and universal at the same time. Conflict, relationships, catastrophe, hope, it’s all here. Through April 28. 3012 Lyndale Ave. S., Mpls., 612-344-1700

Reach Stephanie Xenos at stephaniexenos@yahoo.com.