SHAPES AND THINGS

Things to identify, shapes to perceive: like John Reiss' Colors, this is an apparently simple, actually subtle aesthetic exercise. Using photograms—in which three-dimensional objects are recorded on light-sensitive paper without a camera-Miss Hoban reconstitutes in white on black the everyday black-and-white: block forms are silhouetted; knives and forks have a silvery sheen, and through one spoon appear the letters of alphabet soup (that also spill over from endpapers to title page). Together the teeth of a comb, the bristles of a toothbrush, the squeezed outline of a toothpaste tube have a tactile presence; and in an assemblage of sewing articles, buttons and spools are contoured while the lace recalls an early photogram mistaken for the real thing. A pail and shovel are rial white on black—and on grains of sand like a star-flecked sky; in a spread of kitchen utensils a strainer is a dimity grid and the basketed eggs glimmer like glass decoys. The marvels mount—a mysteriously luminous shell, a lollipop glimpsed through speckled cellophane, the fierce skeleton of a fish. The images are both material and dematerialized, and the familiar yields a startling beauty.