Norman Locks Artnews June Issue: June 1, 2002 Norman Locks’s recent landscape photographs juxtapose cluttered strip malls with pristine wilderness. Eroded boulders, shaded by thousand-year-old Bristlecone pines, give way to modern highways. Locks hangs his color prints in composite groups, bringing out visual and conceptual connections between these antithetical worlds. Analogies are sometimes obvious, like trees compared to utility poles. But usually they’re more nuanced, as when a decayed tree is paired with a demolished building. The juxtapositions add new dimensions to everyday scenes. Although he once assisted Ansel Adams, Locks belongs to a generation that reacted against romanticism of Adams’s landscapes. Locks downplays the spectacular aspects of wilderness, devoting his low-key, evenhanded attention to it’s mundane components, highlighting the passage of time and the interaction of natural and man-made systems. Yet an epic ambition lurks. Locks’s early training included Abstract Expressionist painting, and the dense, allover composition of his prints suggests some similar search for significance in random tangles of lines. Locks finds order in coincidences of shape-between a branch and a stone, or between a mountain and a skyscraper. His sharp focus on everyday places and nondescript elements of nature keeps viewers firmly grounded. The show also featured manipulated Polaroid prints, with which Locks has been experimenting for over 30 years. Rich in exaggerated colors and, again, painterly effects, these images of commonplace scenery underscore the intimate, autobiographical impulse at the heart of the work. Like the art of Zen calligraphy, Locks’s understated images encourage contemplation and exert an ever-stronger pull on viewers’ imaginations, leading them both inward and outward. –Hearne Pardee