(Top Right) Lori Oden, Oklahoma City, We Are a Train Wreck Waiting to Happen, Platinum/Palladium Print from Polaroid 55 Negative, 4”x5” (Bottom Right) Lori Oden, Oklahoma City, I am Safe In Here, Platinum/Palladium Print from Wet Collodion Negative, 8”x10” (Top) Lori Oden, Oklahoma City, You Make me Want to Cry, Platinum/Palladium Print from Wet Collodion Negative, 5”x7”
tracks, running beside this train, dominates the whole left side of the image. The train looks as though it hasn’t moved in years. There is no way another train coming down the second set of tracks could even crash into it. So why is there this provocative title, with its sense of foreboding? The image does not support such an emotional response. Instead of a sense of something evil about to happen, the image suggests that nothing more can happen. What we have here is a rather wistful nostalgia for what had been. In I’m Safe in Here, a sealed mason jar sits on weathered boards. It contains a heart-shaped, hand-written note with the title’s phrase repeated over and over again. An old-fashion key lies next to it, bringing to mind the cliché of “a key to her heart” – even though no key would be required to open this type of jar. I half hoped that she was being ironic – being safe in a fragile glass vessel. But, overall, this image with its trite text came across as far too stagey and self-conscious. It was the least successful image in the thirty-four photographs displayed. All in all, Lori Oden’s Objects and Alchemy offers fleeting glimpses of things that will eventually fade away, though paradoxically preserved by antique processes. Here we see the alchemy of the photographer using historic photographic processes to transform the commonplace into extraordinary, turning dross into silver, if not gold. n About the Author: Janice McCormick is an art reviewer who has been writing about art in Tulsa and Oklahoma since 1990. Currently she teaches philosophy part-time at Tulsa Community College. She can be reached at artreview@olp.net.
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