IR-Land Comes to Three Columns

The photographs in “Adventures in IR-Land” are grey and strange, with a slippery artificiality that has the effect of collapsing distance. That is to say, they look like Mather House, except they’re beautiful.

Currently on exhibition in Mather’s Three Columns Gallery, these photographs are perplexing, visually arresting works. For the gallery’s curator and director, Amber J. Musser ’02, they also reflect a deepening understanding of Three Columns’ place in the house community.

Artist J. Michael Sullivan made the digital photographs on a two-week tour of the Emerald Isle, during which he hauled some 60 pounds of equipment with him as he walked through Ireland’s lush landscape.

The technique that Sullivan used to make the photographs is a complicated, exacting one. The chips found in all digital cameras are extremely sensitive to infrared radiation, Sullivan says. “They put an infrared blocking filter [in digital cameras]” he explains. “So what it does is prevent the infrared information from entering the chip.

“I knew if I took the filter off, it would be very, very sensitive to infrared radiation, and it gives me very bizarre colors,” Sullivan says.

In addition to removing the infrared filter, Sullivan added a dark red filter to block out all blue and green light. “What you end up with is a color picture, but all the colors are shifted to the infrared,” he says.

He describes this starting point as “clay that I can mold in my digital darkroom.” According to Sullivan, almost every photograph in the exhibit was significantly manipulated after it was taken.

He says this helped him cope with the challenge of photographing a country that so frequently appears in pictures.

“This is an anti-green interpretation,” Sullivan says. “There’s a problem with Ireland that it’s so green and so lush that no matter what you do it looks like a postcard. And the last thing any artist wants is for somebody to compliment you by saying ‘Oh it looks like a postcard.’”

Sullivan’s anti-postcards have received a positive reaction in the gallery’s comment book, but this has not been the case for every exhibit at Three Columns.

Musser, a resident tutor in Mather, remembers the controversy that surrounded a show organized by the previous curator. “He made Ken dolls, but he disfigured them as if they were returning veterans from the Iraq war,” she says. Musser says that “a lot of people were like ‘I’m offended that you’re choosing to protest the war in this way.’”

A glance through the gallery’s comment book indicates that other exhibits have drawn the ire of Mather residents as well. One comment reads, “NOT what I want to see after eating.” Another says, “This stuff is bunk.”

Musser attributes some of this controversy to the previous director’s artistic vision, adding that the current director, Boston artist Lance Keimig, “is much more focused on the architecture of Three Columns.”

“I’m not specifically going out looking for work that is not controversial, but I think my own inclination is just towards work that appeals on a more visual level,” Keimig says.

For students who must walk through the gallery on a daily basis, this may be welcome news. Mather House Co-Master Leigh G. Hafrey ’73 says that “for most Mather residents the exhibitions are simply there. You travel through them on the way to get your meals.”

But even if Sullivan’s photographs aren’t exactly confrontational, they command more than a passing glance. Sullivan sees his work as a unique, truthful examination of the Irish landscape.

“Let’s see the land for what it really is,” he says. “It’s haunting, it’s beautiful, and it’s surreal all at the same time. The first day I was there I knew I was on to something.”

—Staff writer Richard C. Beck can be reached at rbeck@fas.harvard.edu.