New Dimensions

Sculpture has been made from driftwood, crushed car bodies, paper and holes in the ground, so why not from photographs? No reason at all, say a growing number of young American and Canadian artists. During the past few years they have been adding a third dimension to photography by sealing photographs in plastic, molding them into shapes and building them into complex structures that transform the original picture. Most of these sculptor-photographers work on the West Coast, and many have studied at U.C.L.A. with Robert Hei-necken, at 38 the old master of the genre. This week some 50 of their pieces go on display at New York's Museum of Modern Art in a show called "Photography into Sculpture" that will later move on to half a dozen other museums in the U.S. and Canada.

Vacuum Molds. Among the best is Joe Pirone, 33, of San Francisco, who mounts up to seven negative and positive transparencies one behind the other in a box, then lights them from behind to create eerie deep spaces. Vancouver's 25-year-old Michael DeCourcy prints high-contrast images of waves, pebbles and flying birds on the sides of cardboard boxes, then has them stacked up by workmen in whatever arrangement they choose. Vacuum molding enables Californians Robert Brown and James Pennuto to transform aerial photographs of rugged terrain into three-dimensional centour maps. The simplest work of all is Jerry McMillan's Torn Bag: a paper bag ripped open to reveal a delicate woodland landscape printed on the inside.

Cubed Nude. Figure sculpture comes in a variety of formats. Full-length photographs were mounted on all four sides of a slab-shaped Styrofoam dummy to create Dale Quarterman's portrait of a leather-jacketed girl. From the back and sides, the girl is whole and clothed, but the dummy is cut out in front to reveal her in successively diminishing images, one within the other. In the last and smallest, she is completely nude. New Yorker Lyn Wells has made a life-size portrait of a neighbor by printing back and front views on sensitized linen, sewing the two pieces together along the outlines and filling the space between with rock-hard urethane foam. The most complex and abstract figure is Jack Dales' Cubed Woman No. 3, a rigidly geometric construction of glass photographic plates in a Plexiglas cube. From each of the four sides there is a different view of the same seated female nude. But at first glance the woman may not be visible at all: each view is broken up into a prismatic abstraction recalling the early cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque.

"These young photographers are more concerned with the photograph as an object or material thing than as an imitative record of what is seen," says Curator Peter Bunnell, who organized the show. "Their aim is to expand the notion of 'making a photograph' from the illusionistic space of the two-dimensional picture into the real space of three-dimensional objects." In the best pieces, the extra dimension of space also adds a mind-teasing new element of meaning.

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