Photographer and artist Annette Gurdjian layers her photographs with paint and the ghostly images of 1.5 million massacred Armenians

PHOTOGRAPHS are paper ghosts. Like silvery echoes from the past, they offer traces of what once was but is no longer, the
captured shadows of people and places long since lost. They haunt us, and that is why we keep them stored safely away in albums and dresser drawers.

In her show in spring 2000 at the Hult Center's Jacobs Gallery, Eugene artist Annette Gurdjian plays on that very ghostly quality of photography. As she has been doing for more than 15 years, Gurdjian paints in oil on the surfaces of photos - often photos of her family - using the original black-and-white image as inspiration rather than a literal guide.

Sometimes the photographs completely disappear. More commonly they peer through the final painting here and there in vague glimpses, like partly grasped memories. Powerful and evocative, monstrous and emotionally draining, Gurdjian's work takes us into a world of intuitive truth laid over literal history, extrapolating from the precise universe of photography into the dream-fired realm of painting. "Figurative Allegories," as the show is named, is billed as being inspired by an oddly distant, little known and overwhelmingly tragic event: the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1923, in which Ottoman Turks massacred 1.5 million Armenians (although the Turkish government denies the massacre ever took place). Among the victims was the family of Gurdjian's grandfather. That fact alone was enough to make me wary of the show, even though I've known Gurdjian and her work for years.

Political art is, far too often, art that's trying to sell you something - not much different in essence from advertising and commercial art. All such art can be interesting, and sometimes even profound, but in the end it is art in service to a cause, art that's secondary to something else.

Gurdjian's paintings, though, clearly come first. A long explanation of the genocide has been painted on one gallery divider, and there's a booklet of musty-looking old photographs of the tragedy, but Gurdjian's paintings are so compelling they easily could have been presented with no context or explanation at all.

In her work, Gurdjian has discovered that narrow frontier where photography and painting can coexist, and that is no easy feat. By their nature, the two media are at war with each other. Photography's precision, modernity, coolness, actuality and smoothness simply don't play well with the brilliance, untamed energy, imagination and suppleness of oils. Paint smeared on a photograph looks too often like a mistake. But Gurdjian has managed to bind the two media into a partnership that works on numerous levels, from the interplay of reality and imagination to the tension between present and past, machinery and artisan, modernity and classicism, time and eternity.

When Gurdjian paints, she begins with normal, everyday reality -- the image as captured by lens and film -- and builds up layers of nuance, adding color here to obscure an image, wiping the paint away there to reveal a portion of a face or hand beneath. It is, she says, an intuitive, irrational process by which she works. Her painting is sublime, a sumptuous display of startling color and solid form. She combines the bright reds and golds of Eastern iconography with the earth tones of the Northwestern school of painters such as C.S. Price.

In "Come to Me, Baby," a 16-inch-by-20-inch photograph painted over almost completely, a crudely sketched human hand reaches out to a large, monstrous, embryonic bird, an ungodly chick whose huge, red eye and punklike comb are enough to give you shivers. The painting pulled me back and back again; the chick is reaching out toward the hand with its ridiculous little cartooned feet, as if to offer an embrace that's at once comforting and horrifying.

Gurdjian paints a lot of birds. Another bird painting, less disturbing, is "The Kiss," in which two birds meet beak to beak, human
faces just showing through from behind the paint. The birds and their strangeness are reminiscent of the Northwest mystic artist
Morris Graves.

So why, given her painting skills, does Gurdjian bother with photos at all? Her painting is so evocative on its own that you're
tempted to dismiss the photography as a gimmick or a crutch. Look at me, she's saying, I do something different than the other million artists out there competing for your attention. But that's unfair. Such an attitude assumes that oil painting without photographs is somehow superior to oil painting with photographs, a kind of classical elitism that the 21st century is still trying to leave behind. The photography is but one more tool, like a different color of paint or texture of canvas. In any case, just knowing the photograph is there -- even unseen -- adds to the delicious tension of Gurdjian's work

Some might find this show depressing. I didn't, despite paintings with such titles as "Man With Blood on His Hands" and "Talking to the Dead." Gurdjian provides us no obvious source of redemption, no happy ending to send us away smiling and hopeful about humanity. There are not a lot of smiling faces to be found here. And that may be why the photographs are essential in her work. It is the strange, dual process of making her art that finally leads to a satisfying transformation.

By overlaying such powerful paintings over everyday photographs, Gurdjian is showing us that imagination and spirit can triumph over the mundane, even tragic, matters of history.

April 23, 2000