Jo Ann Callis ca. 1976

A teacher at the California Institute of the Arts and widely regarded for her conceptual work with three-dimensional objects and images of people in mysterious settings, artist Jo Ann Callis has worked both in black-and-white and color photography, sculpture, painting, set design, and digital imagery. Her color photographs from the mid-1970s take a fetishistic delight in human bodies. Naked, vulnerable, and tied in myriad places, the androgynous men and women in her pictures seem both enchanted and faintly repelled by the circumstances in which they find themselves. Here, Bohn-Spector presents a preview of Callis' oeuvre: beautifully composed, with an unfailing eye toward color and texture, yet laced with the raw shivers of anxiety that run through her work like a chilling undercurrent.