Making believe Surreal at the Griffin, evidentiary at the Fogg BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Maggie Taylor: Then Again" + "John Chervinsky: CaCO3" Griffin Museum of Photography | 67 Shore Road, Winchester | Through September 10 "A New Kind of Historical Evidence: Photographs from the Carpenter Center Collection" Fogg Art Museum | Harvard University, 32 Quincy St, Cambridge | Through October 30

Magical realism in the tradition of Maxfield Parrish’s book illustrations and Robert Parke-Harrison’s photography is the domain of Maggie Taylor’s imagery in "Then Again," her quirky and often satisfying exhibit at the Griffin Museum. Headless rocking-horse riders, women who sprout bouquets from their scalps, ballerinas in full costume in an open field surrounded by rats — these charge Taylor’s pictures with a hard-to-pinpoint emotional energy. Her muted colors and antiquated forms recall the early years of hand-colored photographs.

In Turning (2001), we see the back of a handsomely coiffed woman in a splendid, gold-colored Victorian dress. Her face in profile turns stiffly to the right; her lips clench so tight, it’s as though she’d just been slapped. From two dark vertical incisions on the back of her dress, giant moth wings emerge in a complementary gold hue. The grafting of insect body onto human body makes a funny sort of sense: given her garb and her withdrawn, injured attitude, is it any wonder that she’s mutated into something unreal? Fragile (2003) shows us a red-cheeked boy pulling at a little black string that neatly unhinges the top of his head. Where blood and bone ought to spill out, clouds rise up from his exposed cranium, whose interior reveals a perfect sky-blue disk. The merciless intensity of the boy’s gaze makes the mechanical self-scalping feel downright reasonable. His face tells us that his mind is ready to explode.

It’s to the credit of the Griffin Museum, whose mission is the showcasing of historic and contemporary photography, that it would host Maggie Taylor at all, since her works are actually digital collages. And in part that’s how she achieves her realism: she places directly onto a flatbed scanner the objects that occupy her frames — birds, moth wings, bees, daguerreotypes — and then manipulates them in Photoshop. Whether that places her at the frontier of photography or at the center of an emerging medium hardly matters.

Fighting Man (2003) is a helmeted figure — his face is hidden to the mouth under what looks like a coil of white paper — who sports boxing gloves and an old-fashioned pugilist’s outfit (don’t miss the high riding boots, either) as he readies to throw a right. He stands in a colorful, dreamy space with a green parquet floor at his feet and an ornate baseboard molding on the wall behind him that resembles the headboard of an Edwardian mahogany bed. Scratched onto the mottled green wall is a scorecard of sorts, 11 sets of hatch marks (four short vertical lines crossed by one long diagonal); the 12th is incomplete. There’s no visible opponent, yet he smirks like a winner. Here fighting, which in a different kind of uniform sees people killed every day, seems a self-serving game for blind, solitary men pleased with their athleticism and records and preposterous attire.

I’m less convinced by Taylor’s confections when they veer off into one-liners with a veneer of the surreal or settle for being illustrations. Animals, or parts of animals, tend to occupy those pictures. In Rabbits with Scissors (2003), two girls in high-necked aquamarine smocks have had their heads replaced with the heads of two long-eared orange rabbits who look goofy, cartoonish, as if they’d been culled from photos of porcelain bric-a-brac. And though the girl holding a pair of blue scissors gestures toward the other, and the heads are positioned so as to make it seem they’re conversing, the effect is neither comical nor animated nor disturbing. In Strange Case (2002), an old wicker suitcase floats above a manicured field surrounded by distant pine trees. To the right, a debonair dude in a vest and sports jacket, hands in his pockets and a dog’s head where his own has been digitally erased, looks on with canine nonchalance. Whatever the suitcase might have evoked is undercut by the Monty Pythonesque dog man. The outright illustrations are a different but no less enervated matter. Yellowed pages fly from the distant toy-like dwelling in Poet’s House (1999) to form a heaven-sent curlicue in the sky. Does it matter that the pages contain prose, not poetry? Not much.

But when Taylor doesn’t feel the need to elbow her viewers in the side, she delivers resonant work. In Southern Gothic (2001), a stately young woman in a long-sleeved black blouse and a skirt made out of leaves — her upper half’s been lifted from an antique photo — delicately tears her head open, as if it were a sheet of paper. The rip reaches almost to her right eye in a gesture that would make Hannibal Lecter envious. In Girl with a Bee Dress (2004), the stare of the girl holding a flower in her prayerful clasp is so mesmerizing, you mightn’t notice at first that her dress is a buzzing swarm of carpenter bees.

The companion exhibit to "Then Again" belongs to John Chervinsky, who pursues the magical potential of the photographic process in a more cerebral and austere way. "CaCO3" (the chemical symbol for chalk) investigates and plays with the illusion of three-dimensionality in the flat surface of a photograph. Chervinsky positions two black chalk boards at right angles for his large black-and-white images, creating a small stage that the camera can register only as empty, obsidian space. Then the fun begins. The artist places objects — tools, boxes, eggs, parts of clocks — into his miniature room and draws rough, geometrical designs in white chalk around the objects. The drawings appear to float in space like indelible skywriting; the normal divisions between foreground and background, solid and flat, real and make-believe all vaporize. In Entropy, the guts of a dismantled clock litter the area beneath a not-quite-erased equation. To the left, another white chalk drawing of a crude globe, just two interlocking circles that tilt on an axis, appears like an idea made manifest. The globe mimics 3-D, the clock mimics flatness, and the two coexist like spirit and flesh, unknowable companions.

A disappointing show at Harvard’s Fogg Museum points to the pitfalls of not committing to one organizational idea — either that or the pitfalls of high pretense. The truncated "A New Kind of Historical Evidence: Photographs from the Carpenter Center Collection" represents a minuscule sampling from four vast, distinct, and in some ways antithetical sources that account for the Carpenter Center’s collection: the acquisitions of founding curator Davis Pratt, who emphasized works of historical importance as well as fine-art photography; the acquisitions of subsequent curator Barbara Norfleet, who "challenged assumptions about the meaning and function of photography" (meaning the fine-art collecting ended); the Social Museum Collection of evidentiary images addressing societal ills that were gathered at the turn of the last century by Francis Greenwood Peabody for his courses on social ethics; and, finally, what remains of the Boston Transit Collection that the MBTA donated to Harvard in 1967 and that Harvard in turn mostly gave away under Norfleet’s stewardship in 1986. Even the photos by such masters of the medium as Edward Weston and Eugène Atget can’t resolve this muddle.