Dead zones
Thawing the frozen moments.

By Glen Helfand

FINDING BEAUTY IN death, not to mention the darker aspects of life, is a perennial aesthetic concern of San Francisco-based photographer Richard Barnes. He is both a noted architectural photographer and an artist, with the two practices intersecting most notably in his stark, elegant 1998 image of the Unabomber cabin for the New York Times Magazine. Barnes evoked the madness and violence contained in the cabin by setting it in a studio and isolating the building with a black backdrop.

Using the studio as a photographic setting is a Barnes staple. And the idea of a museum as a funereal location became a reality for Barnes in the mid 1990s, when he photographed the seismic upgrade of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a construction project that unexpectedly revealed the stately museum was built on a cemetery. Barnes photographed the bones and objects that were excavated before being moved to another "final" resting place.

His Hosfelt Gallery show, "Animal Logic," is a new series of works photographed in natural history museums, the subject primarily being stark white animal bones reconstructed or organized for archival presentation. The pictures were shot in a variety of international museums, but the ways in which the bones are exhibited speak a global language of display. The show's largest work is a black-and-white triptych of glass storage cases packed with spiky skeletons and random bones, often with handwritten, seemingly antique identifying labels. The density of these images is dazzling. They evoke etchings of 16th-century wunderkammers, the private collections of natural and artistic wonders that were the roots of modern-day museums. Yet in them, a broad range of life forms become mere parts in a complicated natural cosmology imprisoned behind glass, poised for posterity and pedagogy. Barnes's images capture the tension between their beauty and lifelessness.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, the bones are isolated to highlight a sense of sculptural form. Three photographs taken in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy in Paris purposefully confuse leg and hip bones with sculpture and compare an unidentified creature's rib cage with a vibraphone-like instrument. The most intriguing images result from Barnes's discovery of an unusual 19th-century mode of presentation in which animal skulls, with the aid of intricate armatures, are extended in space so researchers could see into them. Often they veer toward abstraction. Set on three-pronged stands, these "exploded" skulls are specimens stretched in a manner that suggests a formalized violence – like Harold Edgerton's famous fast-frozen picture of a bullet gloriously bursting through an apple. Barnes's black-and-white images, each depicting a single skull against a black background, revel in the sober nature of academia or of beautiful, dead things displayed on Victorian mantles.

Perhaps because the subject matter is rooted in the history-infused halls of museums, the images seem familiar. The artist is no doubt intentional in his use of a classic feel, allowing it to disarm with a sense of being known yet to surprise with layers of meaning as complex as the ingenious hardware that holds the bones together. Still, the cumulative effect of these pictures may tip the balance to a kind of climate-controlled morbidity.

The sculptural tableau of Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, on view next door at Braunstein/Quay Gallery, couldn't seem more aesthetically opposite to Barnes's elegance. Yet the artists share an interest in using art to freeze moments of cultural violence. The signature trope of the Kienholzes is to stop action, rendered in classic funk-assemblage style, in layers of oozing, viscous varnish that hardens into an amber hue. Edward Kienholz died in 1994, and some of the sculptures on view are among the last he created. As is often the case with late-career work, it's not the artist's best, but it's still of interest. The show includes two of their Ponder Chairs, dating from 1993, which seem like torture seats customized with knives and masks. One is topped with a half-decayed piranha-like fish head, its mouth open and gills flayed with anger.

In a few of her own works, Nancy Reddin Kienholz continues the family tradition of morbid fascinations. Ilse's Home, a 1999 piece, is an homage to a notorious Nazi doyenne whose fashion tastes included human-skin handbags. Her legend is depicted on an ornate mantle as a rodent figure with a mane of bloody tendrils and a stole of shrewish mink. An illuminated handbag is emblazoned with tattoos. Another work, The Blue Bird of Peace (1997-98), memorializes the torture of North Korean political prisoners. Phew!

Thankfully, the pair find power in levity. The show is rounded out with a series of somewhat whimsical 1992 sculptures dubbed Useful Art. One has a working toaster set amid car battery cables and moldering anonymous photos, while another is composed of suitcase-chair hybrids, furniture for wandering souls, especially those with a taste for the dark side.

'Animal Logic.' Through March 20. Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina, S.F. (415) 495-5454. Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Through March 13. Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Braunstein/Quay Gallery, 430 Clementina, S.F. (415) 278-9850.