Mona Kuhn's photographs evoke states of being that are at once foreign and familiar. When I first saw her images, I felt the dislocation of a time traveler encountering a realm that we, in modern life, have almost lost through our carelessness or consciously abandoned with our callousness. In that far off place, figures sit or stand or lie together with natural grace, resembling the Greek gods that Roberto Calasso reminds us have never left the world even though we have overlooked their presence here. In her photographs, Kuhn enables these archetypes to spring into physical form once again from deep within our psyches. Although Mona's images call up collective memories and epochs long past, they are at the same time very much located in the reality of our own age. Her vision is ultimately hopeful at a time when the contemporary world needs such hope. The figures are quiet, but not empty; they are self-contained, but not narcissistic. They stand alone as anyone does in these troubled days - often with only a single figure in focus with the group - yet they remain intertwined in relationships with the surrounding, blurred figures - the single figure part of a still greater nexus. The images state that while we each carry our own life, we are all in this together. As I spend time looking at Mona's work, my vision shifts as a different current seems to pull me into the photograph. I begin to wonder whether the figure in focus is actually located in the same physical space as the background figures or whether the others, mysteriously blurred, exist only in the mind of the main figure. The photograph now reads as an interior portrait. Kuhn uses the camera, the most descriptive and literal of all artistic instruments, to make dream images of rich visual and psychological ambiguity. These are photographs you can see with your eyes shut. These photographs pulse with a deeper rhythm, only revealing their full content slowly over time. Hers is an uncommonly incandescent and generous vision in photography today as she takes us into her quiet realm of deep emotion, human interaction, self-awareness, and memory.

by Chuck Katz Jr.