This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: October 5, 2008 - With Alma Mater, on view at UMSL’s Gallery 210, Jennifer Dorsey has found the perfect subject matter to suit her photographic style and temperament. She’s gone into classrooms, lounges, refectories and hallways of two patrician private high schools, St. Alban’s and the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C. (where she herself teaches), photographing them empty of people but full of their traces.
Dorsey lived in St. Louis until a few years ago and has continued to show here, most recently with her Bridal Series at the Greenberg-Van Doren Gallery in 2007. She’s established a reputation for photographing spaces in which the architecture, the operations, and indeed the products on offer, are marked mainly by their comforting, bland anonymity: pizza chains, bridal dress shops, offices. Alma Mater, too, foregrounds the homogeneity that reigns even in these more exclusive establishments.
Like the German photographer Candida Höfer, Dorsey’s focus is often on furniture, particularly chairs, which are the perfect ersatz humans, their idiosyncrasies embedded in the same basic chassis, as with the red leather chairs lined up in “Trophy Room,” which suggest a team portrait (one chair is taller by a head than the others). In institutional contexts, rows of chairs and other furnishings produce even as well as syncopated rhythms, irresistible subjects for photographers of spaces. Dorsey’s “Whitby Gym” presents a screen of gold curtains subverted by one upstart, who insists on being tied up in a knot.
In some of the photographs, Dorsey breaks her own mold, skewing the framing just slightly or rejecting symmetry, multiplicity and rhythm in favor of more diffuse arrangements of telling things. This is certainly the case in “Periodic Table,” a look at the front of a chemistry classroom, or “Faculty Room,” where a shlumpy sofa looks like it just needs a break from it all.
Alma Mater is a quiet show that opened with little fanfare. It runs the risk of being overlooked in this autumn of splashy shows. Don’t let it. Dorsey’s show is a must see.
Ivy Cooper is an artist and professor of art history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.