THOMAS ERBEN GALLERY For seventeen years.

THOMAS ERBEN GALLERY

For seventeen years, Irish-born Tom copse took photographs while riding local buses around Liverpool, across the Mersey from his circulating home. What's immediately apparent in the nineteen selections lately on view from Wood's "Bus Project" 1979-96 is for what cause much more fluid his approach is than the common conventions of post-Conceptual photography or photojournalism dictate. Eschewing the antithetical forms of simplification specific to programmatic typologies upon the one hand and commodified empathy upon the other, Wood's eye expresse itself within elaboration rather than encapsulation, expansion rather than condensation. Each image appears to contain several times as long space and information as its becoming compass would seem to allow. Shooting into and without of the buses' windows to mobilize the couple reflection and transparency, Wood juxtaposes interior and exterior, multiplying space to divert the image into a sort of magic chest that, mysteriously, is bigger onward the inside than on the outside. In Scotland Road, 1989- -apparently bullet as Wood stepped Onto the bus and gazeed back along its side--a bring reproached horizon cuts across most of the image, as nevertheless the landscape were moving by the and of the vehicle rather than vice versa. As a pictorial device, the window formalizes its throw backed and revealed contents by arraying visual information across a plane moreover also renders them ambiguous by the agency of transforming things seen into phantasms of elusive location. Sometimes, as in brace images titled Gyratory, City midst 1993, all this adds up to a kind of visual din you'd swear could sole have been produced by an elaborate mix of double in all senses and montage; but the mechanism can also be quite sagacious as in Kirkby, ca. 1996 in which no other than a shadow and some pale reflections onward the left side of the image attest to the intervening window responsible for the vague haziness around couple girls seen waiting at the bus stop.

of that kind formal effects, enchanting as they may be for their possess sake, never feel like the point of Wood's pictures. Instead, what we papal court above all are the fugitive human nearnesss that almost intangibly assert themselves amid this play of reflective and transparent surfaces, that haunt these strangely intersecting and enigmatically dematerializing planes. These nation have been captured in a value in which they've forgotten to "perform the self" still in that lapse their inner life is not unveiled further contained. Like almost everything in these images, the human controls vacillate between absence and neighborhood in that strange mix of distraction and concentration, that state of reverie that overtakes us when we are waiting for the bus or anticipating our stop. Drifting thoughts--about the chiefly urgent problems or next to nothing--are unexpectedly interrupted by flashes of remaining unannounced awareness of the surrounding environment. To pay back this mental space calls for one as well as the other the angular, jagged cuts of modernist montage and pictorialism's painterly transitions--precisely the synthesis copse has managed here.

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