| The Southampton Press
February 23, 2006
Show Helps Boost West's Credentials
By Eric Ernst
In the area west of the Shinnecock Canal, galleries and exhibition venues such as Riverheads' East End Arts Council and the Lyceum Gallery at Suffolk Community College have begun with more frequency to stage exhibitions that are making old distinctions about the difference in quality of exhibits on either side of the canal less and less relevant.
One of the shows illustrating this trend is the exhibition at the Lyceum Gallery of Cheryl Machat Dorskind's handpainted photographs, which create an interesting connection between two disparate artistic approaches. Often seeming more aesthetically adversarial than complimentary, the relationship between painting and photography was summed up by the photographer Stig Evans when he stated that "photography isn't art, it's marksmanship."
In these works, however, Ms. Dorskind is able to find a complementary melding of the two through her accomplished and subtle use of coloration. While this conveys within the photographs a distinctly painterly sensation, it is not one that dominates the combined visual experience.
 Cheryl Machat Dorskind's "Yoga #2" is one of the works on view at the Lyceum Gallery at the Suffolk Community College Eastern Campus in Riverhead.
As a result, the pieces straddle the line separating painting and photography and thereby serve to artfully blur the distinctions that led the artist
Charles Sheeler to observe that "photograph is nature seen from the eyes outwards, while painting is nature seen from the eyes inwards."
In some ways, the greatest impact from these pieces comes from the simple fact that the method Ms. Dorskind uses has become somewhat anachronistic in our digital age, which some see as the coming of the apogee of technology's century-long quest to eventually remove the human hand from the creative process.
This movement, if it can be called that, has come to influence an audience used to the less subtle (yet admittedly more egalitarian) possibilities currently available in Photoshop and other graphic programs. And yet one finds in Ms. Dorskind's works a powerful amalgamation of photography, painting, and drawing.
The author of what has been described as the "definitive guide to hand coloring photographs," Ms. Dorskind's starts with black and white images and applies coloration marked by a delicately refined sense of constraint that serves to allow the relationships in hues to remain uniformly consistent.
At the same time, there is always in her works, a hint of painterly light and shadows, which imparts a dreamlike quality to atmospheric effect and which further accentuates the works' mysteriously evocative ambience.
This is particularly apparent in "Balloons" (oil on gelatin silver print) in which Ms. Dorskind's use of playfully bright balloons takes on somewhat surreal overtones in the balloons powerful contrast with the black and white clouds in the background.
Conjuring a rhythmic counterbalance in movement as the foreground and background seem to be moving in opposite directions, this contrast is further heightened by the artist's establishment of a compositional framework that is centrally structured yet still dominated by asymmetrical elements.
The exhibition of Cheryl Machat Dorskind's photo paintings continues at the Lyceum Gallery at Suffolk Community College in Riverhead through March 3.
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