By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer

The Lexington Camera Club is back with another photography exhibition, conjuring up a storm. “Conjure 2025,” which opens Monday at the recently renovated Gray Design Building at the University of Kentucky as part of the Louisville Photo Biennial, is a showcase for the work of 36 Central Kentucky photographers committed to looking at the world with fresh eyes.

“The idea is that as artists and photographers, we’re conjuring photos based on our view of the world,” club member Tom Eblen says in an interview. “It’s an open concept that allows us to show work that we’ve been doing that’s creative and timely. It might also mean to evoke, to call something to the mind’s eye as if by magic.” Club leader Guy Mendes, perhaps Lexington’s best-known photographer, notes that the word conjure “means things like ‘to summon up’ or ‘to create through legerdemain or sleight-of-hand,’ which I really love. The idea is to bring something into being that wasn’t there before.” 

In keeping with these definitions, many of the photographs in the show lean into the strange, the surreal and the downright macabre. David Coyle’s “Light Flight,” a reflection shot featuring a heron soaring above a brooding skyline, feels like a scene from the Upside Down in “Stranger Things” — the bird’s form weirdly distorted in a way that suggests a pterodactyl. Other curious creatures seem to lurk in Debra Booker’s “It’s In There Somewhere,” while Maryjean Wall’s mysteriously gauzy “Smokescreen” (featured top of page) might require the viewer to take a very long look before its true subject — a trio of horses all but lost in the haze — reveals itself. “It’s a great picture,” Mendes says of Wall’s photograph. “At first I looked at it and couldn’t understand it. Then I looked again and suddenly saw it. We’re in Kentucky, and it’s a horse picture, but what I love about it is that it’s a contrary kind of horse picture.”

Some of the photographers use layers, color overlays, digital collage and other design wizardry to achieve their poetic, often otherworldly effects. Melissa Watt’s “Brood 17,” among the most technically complicated images in the show, creates a dark, ritualistic, possibly comic fantasy featuring birds and a turtle gathered around a giant cicada hanging batlike in the middle of a lushly vegetated swamp. Marcia Hopkins’s “Tulipa,” in which ghostly flowers are framed by the even ghostlier backdrop of a window with a woman’s face peering through, feels like a glimpse into memory. “Marcia does these fantasy scenes,” Eblen says, “while Melissa does fantasy universes.” In “A Sunflower’s Tears” by Bill Cole, the flower seems to be weeping petals in an image that might have appealed to Magritte or Dalí. 

Elsewhere in the show, other club members locate the uncannily evocative images the old-fashioned way: in the world as they find it. (Full disclosure: I am a Lexington Camera Club member and my work, which generally fits into this genre, is also represented in the show.) These include “Wizard,” in which Walt Foreman shows us a gnarled and ancient tree whose features — including what can be seen as arms, eyes and a pair of gaping mouths — recall those of Treebeard the Ent from Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Sharon Ruble’s “Coastal Wind” captures more haunted trees, this time in the process of yielding to the enchantment of weather. “You Break You Buy,” a continuation of Liz Hansen’s recent series of shots of mannequins and other objects in antique malls, adds a layer of wry humor to the spookiness.