Susan Hacker Stang received both her degrees from Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied photography with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. She came to St. Louis in 1974 when she joined the faculty of Webster University. She is currently head of the photography program there. Much of the work on display in this exhibit was produced during 1998-1999, while on sabbatical from the university.

Stone, water, human bodies, air impossibly clear: Susan Stang’s radiant images of Italy are permutations on these elementary themes. The medium that makes her vision luminous is the inimitable Mediterranean light. Light in its infinite variety permeates her photographs and fashions their elements in startling ways, making familiar sights take on new textures. Solids and liquids seem to mutate, shifiing shapes and exchanging properties. Water assumes the vaporousness of air, and stone the warm, supple feel of human flesh. Shadows seem painted on stone; clouds float inside a hazy sea; the inky walls of a grotto could be a nighttime sky, its waters some glinting metal.

For all their transfonnations, the surfaces and densities under Stang’s lens have nothing to hide; temples, canals, fountains, and bathers bathed in light offer themselves with unabashed forthrightness. Hers is a world make gloriously explicit—sharp brights and darks, few hidden crevices or gray areas, each leaf and cobblestone and peeling wall distinct. The light is everywhere, penetrating and clarifying: “That which has no substance enters where there is no space.”

In an age nurtured on subtleties, shadows, and ambiguity, this is a fairly radical vision. Is there no mystery in the visible world? Not in things themselves, Stang suggests. Not on their surfaces. The mystery is all in the ambience, the miracle of light filtered through air and air filtered through light, together yielding such rich clarities.

For the viewer, another mystery lies in Stang’s serene and cultivated gaze. It gives a confident answer to the ancient question: “Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light’?” [Lynne Sharon Schwartz, New York City, February 20011

Gallery Hours: Mondays & Tuesdays, 9 am. - 5 p.m.. Tuesday csenings 7-9 p.m., Saturdays 10 a.m.-2 p.m., and one hour prior to each Sheldon concert and during intermission. Galleries may also he visited by appointment. Call 314.533.9900  for more information. Visit our website at www.sheldonconcerthall.org