Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms

Bookforum

Sarah Nicole Prickett

Callis: A (woman's) hand, dredged in flour, nails blackened, rests flat in a yolk of honey on a smooth, eggshell-colored bedsheet. You also glimpse a thigh, and the glint of hairs. Nothing in teh image tells you why. It appears halfway through this new volume, which is the first to survey skin in Callis's work-and, with its funny, silky slippages, exemplifies her dollhouse surrealism. The publication of "Other Rooms" is excellently timed. There is an international vogue for old-school printed nudity, as well as a furor over nipples on Instagram; the Museum of Modern Art (New York) recently staged a retrospective for Robert Heinecken, whom Callis studied photography with at UCLA. Of the eighty-three images in this book, eighty-two were made in the-mid 70's, when color film was still gaining traction as fine art; seventy-two are in color. All but two contain at least one body part. The bodies are white, slim but not muscular, untouched by scalpel or ink; the decor is self-consciously modest.

Rain Taxi

Elena Shafan

Other Rooms presents both color and black-and-white photographs by Callis, most of the human form-and the rare image bereft of it, such as "Yellow Room," feels utterly haunted./p>Other Rooms comes with a well-wrought preface by novelist Francine Prose, who seeks the work as primarily a discourse on sex-and indeed, the Freudian dreamscape here is evocative, with its piles of black sand and pools of honey. But add to that rhetoric a concern wtih poetics of space, those lush pockets of air and light that surround the image as it's seen by the mind's eye. This too, Callis has captured with her camera-a feat of quiet astonishment.

Whitehot

Shana Nys Dambrot

Aside from the scholarly and emotional impact of seeing these seminal images collected in one place, with the editorial participation of the artist, there is something satisfyingly lush and tactile about the production value of the book itself which underscores the subtle luminosity and erotic pleasure animating these nevertheless fiercely feminist portraits.

American Photo

Debbie Grossman

A student of Heinecken at UCLA, Callis offers a female counterpoint to his work: She teases us with sexuality through provactive poses, skin altered by lipstick and binding, relics of fetishes, and another's roving hands.