Up Close and Personal

I know I'm not alone in wondering what direction The Warehouse Gallery will take in a post-Astria Suparak era. Suparak, the gallery's recently terminated director, had built a solid reputation for mounting smart, edgy-to-the-point-of-controversial group exhibitions. She featured national and international contemporary artists who engaged a wide variety of media. Under her leadership, The Warehouse Gallery was providing the Syracuse visual arts community with a quality and range of shows that no other venue in the area was offering - a breath of fresh air.

So, when I heard The Yes Men - a widely acclaimed, sometimes maligned, band of cultural interventionists - had pulled out of their scheduled "show" at The Warehouse Gallery, I was wondering what would, or could, take their place. The answer is - drum roll, please - a photography show.

This was most likely a quick fill to solve the gap created by the cancellation of The Yes Men, so I think it's only fair to the gallery's interim curator, Jeffrey Hoone, that we wait to see what kinds of shows will be charting the future for this important visual arts venue. Hoone, at the eye of the storm surrounding Suparak's termination, deserves a chance to show us the direction he will take the gallery. He knows he's under a microscope and that community expectations are high.

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I also want to be fair to the photographer, because the work of South African-born Gary Schneider is interesting work. Even if most of what's on view at The Warehouse Gallery is 10 years old, it is new to Syracuse.

The title of the show, "Gary Schneider: genetic self-portrait," concisely describes the essence of the work. He rides the wave of James Watson and Francis Crick's breakthrough discoveries in the fields of DNA and genetic coding in the early 1950s by engaging the most salient elements of himself to reveal a composite, if not somewhat anonymous, self-portrait.

The defining features Schneider selects in creating his self-portrait are not in the bend of his neck or the shape of his eyes, specific traits unique to each of us. They are in a single strand of his hair, the irises and retinas of his eyes and the ghostlike prints of his hands. Schneider presents these images in the visual language of science: dramatic, high-contrast black and white shapes and forms that read like X-rays. He engages light and electron microscopes and dental X-rays to capture individual chromosomes, genes and droplets of blood that are as specific as they are vague.

What makes this work interesting is the realization that buried in the crossroads of this anonymity lie the similarities of humankind. Only 1 percent of our DNA is unique to each of us. A full 99 percent we share in common with every other human being on the face of the earth. Schneider's reinterpretation of portraiture is as much a statement about humanity as it is about himself.

The problem with the work is that to engage fully with it you must take the time to read Schneider's explanations regarding his processes. You can find the descriptions on a newly installed touch-screen monitor located on the east wall of the gallery. With so much explanation required to contextualize the work, process can easily trump the aesthetic for some artists. That's not the case with most of Schneider's images, such as a strand of gray hair or the photo of his retinas, which suggest the soft focus and mysterious tones of Edward Steichen's pictorialist photos. But the 22 images of chromosomal pairs get boring after the third or fourth set. It's only within context, which in this case becomes a crutch, that these pieces hold up.

This is certainly not a defining show for The Warehouse Gallery, but we all recognize it's at a crossroads. Which path its management chooses to follow and the role it chooses to play in Syracuse's visual arts community will be determined in the next couple of shows.

Katherine Rushworth, of Cazenovia, is a former director of the Michael C. Rockefeller Arts Center (State University College at Fredonia) and of the Central New York Institute for the Arts in Education.