Take a closer look at eveyday life

Windows

Karen Kaighin

Through May 15

Pittsburgh Filmmakers Gallery

477 Melwood Avenue… Windows

Karen Kaighin

Through May 15

Pittsburgh Filmmakers Gallery

477 Melwood Avenue (412) 681-5449

Do you remember how much fun it was as a kid to use an empty paper-towel roll or wrapping-paper tube as a telescope? After the fun of using it as a megaphone wore off, you’d hold it up to your eye, inspecting your surroundings in small, isolated scenes.

You’d see part of the couch, half of your mother’s face, the stack of magazines on the coffee table. And somehow, because your field of vision had shrunk so much, you could see detail, light and color in a totally new way (even if you didn’t recognize it at the time). This sensation is akin to what Karen Kaighin presents in “Windows,” an exhibition of photographs on display at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ gallery.

Kaighin has reduced our aperture of vision, our window through which we see the world, to a fraction of its normal size. Through her window (which often includes actual windows), we now see the hand turning up the corner of a card that’s just been dealt, but we don’t see the arm or person attached to it. We see a dresser drawer overflowing with clothes, but we can’t tell if the rest of the room is a mess or completely immaculate. In that way, we are forced to consider and appreciate the details of each composition.

However, Kaighin’s windows do much more. In “Morning Light,” we have focused our vision on a glass of orange juice sitting on a table. What we see around it is blurred but coolly evocative. The elbow of someone sitting at the table and the bright green leaves of the trees visible through the window behind it are out of focus. The light coming through the window makes the orange juice glow the color of overripe pumpkins; the base of the glass sparkles as rays bend through it. You can almost taste the tanginess of the OJ and feel the slow, easy hour of early morning.

“New York” requires you to be an active viewer as you look through Kaighin’s double window. At first glance, the composition is ambiguous — you see a piece of water-beaded glass cutting across the print, and two gray fields bisected by a T-shaped area of light. It’s not until you force your eyes to look closely that you discover that those dark, fuzzy fields seem to have a regular pattern of squares on them that resemble windows, that you realize you are looking up at two sky scrapers from a rain-streaked car window.

In this exhibit, Kaighin has slowed time to a crawl. She has zoomed in on a piece of the world around her — a bug on a door screen, a woman’s torso as she reclines — in just the way we’d actually see it if we were looking closely. Only what we focus on is clear, everything else is a blur of color and light. In that way, unlike a photograph with a more encompassing view, we can explore and respond to the character of the details around us.

You feel the wonder of life while looking at the head of a bird, photographed through a magnifying glass. You experience a claustrophobic, caged-in sensation while looking at an opaque, textured piece of glass in “Institutional Window.”

Kaighin has slowed us down, zoomed us in, and made us think and feel about the different window-like scenes we see around us. All said, a trip to North Oakland to view “Windows” would be time well spent. Time to slow down and get a closer look at looking.