The wrongness of images, or our appreciations of them: What appears to be a painting is actually a photograph. What appear to be two-dimensional painted lines, curves, rectangles, arabesques, planes of color, or abstract geometrics with tromp l´oeil shadows are in fact three-dimensional objects carefully arranged, brightly illuminated, and flattened into a beguiling single plane by the lens of a camera.
The eye recognizes but cannot entirely unravel distortion; the mind flits between different possibilities. However, as with Wittgenstein´s duck- rabbit, Escher´s irrational cube, or Penroseés tribal, no settled reality emerges. Is the swath of turquoise blue in Circle, Circle flat or angled? How does one black circle face us directly, while the other lies flat and foreshortened, like Holbein´s famous disk-shaped skull?
O´Keefe´s photographs, subtly, even cheerfully, disrupt the eyes´s or the cameras ability to comprehend space. The artist´s work recalls her background in architecture, a discipline in which model building – the construction of synthetic trials and variants of space in miniature as a means of testing possibilities – is essential.