Excerpted from ArtScene
ARLENE BOGNA and BARBARA BLATT
By Suvan Geer (July 2008)
Arlene Bogna’s "Safari Americana" photographs make the viewer sink into a nostalgic reverie. They include color-saturated images of hulking man-made bovines standing like dumb, complacent sentinels in dark R.V. parks or empty dirt lots. They exert a strong whiff of this country’s historic car culture. She asks us to consider what it is in human nature, or the American psyche, that makes us delight in the sight of painted, three dimensional animals perched atop sign poles or hawking honey from flat bed trucks. Bogna’s images have the spontaneous feel of snapshots, yet the carefully orchestrated camera angles and artist’s repeated down-low perspective capture the sheer naive exhibitionism of the roadway animal signs.
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