Karen Ostrom. Glovemaker, 2005; chromogenic print; 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

This ongoing project echoes Ostrom’s biography without becoming a strict interpretation of her life. Hailing from a family of Swedish immigrants who flocked to the northwest coast in the early 20th century, Ostrom imagined Holiday in Hope as a reference to the utopian dream many of the Scandinavian immigrants held in their quest for a new home. These immigrants, in search of idyllic landscapes in which to build new and experimental communities, are in some ways the forefathers of the residents of Holiday in Hope.

Karen Ostrom. The Execution, 2005; chromogenic print; 30 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Ostrom stays true to her Scandinavian heritage, and her tableaus have a fairytale-like quality that teems with a sense of foreboding. Holiday in Hope is a place full of irony. One of Ostrom’s characters, Glovemaker (2005), embodies a sense of paradox; pictured in what looks like a cold cell or sterile factory space, the glovemaker appears out of place. Played by Ostrom (the artist acts out all her subjects), the figure is surrounded by an array of what Ostrom calls the handglove, which she describes as “a latex glove hybridized with a human hand.” There’s a sense of tragedy in this image—the glovemaker’s craft becomes obsolete when industry is mechanized and hand craftsmanship is lost.

Karen Ostrom. Seamstress, 2005; chromogenic print; 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

In various depictions, there is also a latent sense of violence that varies in emphasis. The violence in Glovemaker takes the form of implied deterioration of the need for “skilled hands.” In The Execution (2005), however, the violence is more pronounced. It echoes one of the more brutal and iconic images of war in modern-day times: Eddie Adams’s Saigon Execution (1968). (Ostrom often uses well-known imagery as a basis for her photographs.) Perhaps this is an attempt to ground the imaginary in the real, but the positioning of the residents of Holiday in Hope in this emblematic composition also has its own peculiar quirks. Both figures in the photograph appear to be one and the same person, and the outfit is the same one that the Glovemaker owns, so is it a self-execution? There is much that is open to speculation. Even though the artist carefully constructs and layers the photographs—she shoots original images and then manipulates them in Photoshop—there is still an element of surprise. In The Execution, Ostrom reveals that the suspenders ominously spelling the word KILL was pure coincidence, but one that aptly captions the subject.

Karen Ostrom. [The Third of May, 1808], 2012; chromogenic print; 42 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Karen Ostrom is a Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based artist working in photography, installation, video, and, most recently, animation. She is the recipient of MacDowell Colony Artist Fellowships, Canada Council for the Arts Grants, the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography from the Canada Council, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

Hauntology, co-curated by Larry Rinder and Scott Hewicker, at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, posits that the past inhabits the present in the same way that an individual’s past shapes how he perceives and acts in the present. By extension, art history and contemporary art are not so much in an ancestor-descendent relationship as they are roommates cohabiting the studio and the gallery. As roommates will, the past and present forever borrow from each other’s wardrobes; that is, the past and the present are not two things but one, participating in a constantly evolving mutual creation of meaning.

Paul Sietsema. Ship Drawing, 2009 (detail); ink on paper, diptych; 50 3/4 x 70 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

One of my teachers, the late Stan Rice, said that if you can’t title a work, you haven’t figured out what it is about. The flip side of this flip remark is that you can title a project and ignore the title; this practice is endemic to the stated themes of art biennials and is something that curators can do in their smaller exhibitions, as well. A provocative title can finesse the flaws in obscurely or randomly assembled objects. At the same time, it is no secret that public institutions’ collapsing budgets make relatively inexpensive shows sourced from museums’ permanent collections desirable—as are shows of recent acquisitions. Hauntology is a group show of some fifty works, mostly recently acquired objects augmented by older pieces from the Berkeley Art Museum collection. An intelligent and economical endeavor gussied up with reference to Jacques Derrida, Hauntology nevertheless contains many wonderful individual art pieces and some very touching or clever arrangements.

After walking through a photography exhibition that juxtaposed works from the history of photography in groups of twos, threes, and fours, the late photographer Larry Sultan remarked that he preferred the sets in which he was forced to ponder what exactly the curators had seen that he at first failed to see, as opposed to those in which he found the shared thematic threads more obvious. Halfway through Hauntology, two medium-size works are placed to the left and right of the entrance to the second gallery. Essentially identical at first glance, the two works, Abstract Painting #3 (1960), by Ad Reinhardt, and an untitled work (2008–09) by Carina Baumann, appear to be grayish black monochromes.

Paul Schiek. Similar to a Baptism, 2007; chromogenic print; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the UC Berkeley Art Museum.

The Reinhardt contains a nearly invisible rectangle of a slightly different hue at its bottom center. The Baumann, on close inspection, reveals a face emerging from the gloom. Two artists, one living and one dead, separated by the gulf of an empty wall, collapse time by addressing the same retinal phenomenon from the point of view of two different generations.

The exhibition is at its best when the curators avoid the spooky-for-its-own-sake. As wonderful as death-drenched folk art can be—who can resist an eighteenth-century mourning embroidery for a lost-at-sea husband?—Twirling Wires (2001), a Roger Ballen photograph of a bald man, wrapped in a blanket at the bottom of the print and cowering beneath an unexplained gigantic ball of razor wire, is far more uncanny. Similarly, Okyo’s 1750 Ghost of Oyuki—the wall label suggests that Oyuki is the source for much of the manga stylebook—is great fun. However, sussing out the relationship between one of Vincent Fecteau’s always-perfect shelf sculptures and Mitzi Pederson’s large 2009 untitled floor-based mixed media is much more satisfying and moving.

Julia Couzens, an underappreciated Sacramento artist, is represented with a charcoal drawing. Being Exposed #41 (1991) definitely depicts something organic—a body part or a vegetable—but I couldn’t describe it in any other way than to say that it is inarguably luscious. Nearby is a dreamy watercolor by Laurie Reid and Nocturne (1878), a James McNeill Whistler riverscape that is shrouded in mist. D.L. Alvarez’s drawing titled Dead (2009) depicts young people at a rock concert, transfixed, in a grouping that includes Goya’s famous Sleep of Reason (1799) and explores people sleeping or swooning.

Paul Sietsema’s 2009 diptych Ship Drawing is a large drawing that suggests a found and damaged photograph of a two-masted nineteenth-century sailing vessel that evokes the (ever-creepy) legendary Flying Dutchman ghost ship. The left-hand panel appears to be the back of the same print or an erased version of it. This kind of exercise—a haunting of Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased de Kooning—is as evocative as anything else in the show. Finally, Paul Schiek’s Similar to a Baptism (1977) is a photograph of foamy ocean turbulence in which the splashing water suggests the arms of an octopus, among which can be seen a swimmer’s head. It is a perfect metaphor for Hauntology’s argument that we are all just trying to keep our heads above water amid a flood of images, memories, associations, and histories.

Hauntology is on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum through December 5, 2010.