Jan Groover: Photographs

Groover's artful color photographs of kitchen utensils transform the mundane into the surreal. A picture might juxtapose a fork, vegetables and a spatula, creating a mysterious, elegant microworld in which familiar forms take on new meanings. This American photographer's precise yet richly colored triptychs of suburban New Jersey lawns and clapboard houses present suburbia as a sane refuge. Her calm, detached New York cityscapes of empty lots and abandoned buildings exude an almost perverse serenity. And her elaborate tabletop still-lifes of bottles, fruit, bones and goblets are darkly beautiful meditations on time and mortality. Groover's most recent pictures, sunny views of her new home in the French countryside, seem to be complex allegories on the interplay of nature and society. Szarkowski, former director of photography at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, limns Groover as an artist whose goal is to reinvent photography and to clarify its history. (June)