(Review from DCist contributor J.T. Kirkland of Thinking About Art)

For as long as there have been magic tricks, magicians have worked very hard to keep the secrets of their trade, well, secret. Part of the allure of magic is that the viewer always asks, “How’d he do that?”

We never question a magic trick before it takes place. That just doesn’t make sense. As soon as we’ve been fooled, however, we naturally want to understand how our brains were duped into believing a person was actually cut in half and put back together. But to understand how a magician achieves a particular illusion diminishes the impact of the feat.

Unlike magic, understanding the process that artist Barbara Probst uses for her series of photographs currently installed at G Fine Art greatly enhances the viewer’s experience of the work. Like much contemporary art, the process of making these photographs is just as (if not more) important than the resulting final images. In this series of work, Probst has focused on deconstructing the photographic process while at the same time obliterating the concept of a single photographic point of view. The artist achieves this feat by executing elaborately choreographed photo shoots.