Gravy Studio + Gallery presents 'Immersion: Photographic Works by Elina Ruka'

Ruka grew up near the Baltic, but she never learned to swim. “I have this complicated relationship with water,” she says. “I love water, but I also have a fear of it. I understand how much more powerful it is than us.”

Rough topography

That ferocity comes across most clearly in the show’s largest piece, an eight-panel panorama of steely-gray water under a pewter sky. A wave begins on the far left, and the panels capture its momentum: swell, rise, crest, and crash.

The broad sweep of the work (it’s 136 inches across) and the absence of shoreline made me certain this image, titled Le Décalage Horraire (“Jet Lag”) must be the Baltic or the Atlantic. But it’s actually Lake Michigan, the water Ruka photographed obsessively while in graduate school at Columbia College.

This piece, like the others, is unframed. Its panels are anchored to the wall only at the top, so each segment floats lightly as the viewer passes. Through such nontraditional display choices, Ruka conveys her subject’s fluidity, the way our experience of water is shaped by wind, stance, and light.

Ruka sometimes layers images to emphasize water’s rough topography: the sea’s surface looks tumultuous, a blue-gray blanket being punched from beneath. Other times, the water seems raked into lacy, light-dappled patterns.

Dynamic seascapes

No landform is visible in any of Ruka’s prints; in Clear Perplexities — an image of water doubled like a Rorschach inkblot — even the horizon ceases to be a meaningful distinction, with “sky” mirroring sea mirroring sky.

The show’s title piece, Immersion, uses frames to underscore the paradox of photographing something that cannot be contained. For this large, indigo-hued image of the Atlantic, shot from the coast of Ireland, Ruka cut photographs into rectangular frames of increasing sizes, then pinned them to the wall — the largest frames furthest from the surface — for a shadowbox effect.

The result is a three-dimensional collage, each rectangle isolating one small piece of the ocean’s surface: an eddy of foam, a busy vortex, a blue-white abstract swirl. Together, they create a seascape so dynamic I could almost hear the rumble of waves and sniff the brackish spray.

Whether ocean, sea, or lake, the water in Ruka’s images shifts constantly, altering in contour and color from nearly black to cobalt to gray-green to a filigree of white and light. The water is opaque and transparent, tranquil and fierce; look away for a moment, and it will change.

Ruka’s fascination with water led her to research marine biology and ponder the vast power of oceans. She’s particularly interested in the effects of climate change, which have spurred hurricanes, tsunamis, and rising seas.

“It’s fascinating that the deep ocean holds so much unknown for us. We only look at the surface, but what’s beneath the surface?” she asks. In her work, that idea is both literal and metaphoric. She photographs the same body of water multiple times, stacking the images to convey that “Nothing is black or white. We have different answers. There are layers of complexity.”

Lost at sea

Her least successful images were those that stretched metaphor — and technique — farthest: two pieces that sliced and overlay images so the resulting abstracts were nearly unrecognizable as water.

Yes, the isosceles triangles in Reciprocity evoke a boat’s sails, but that boat is moored on a blank background, lacking the movement and immersion that make the rest of the show so compelling. And Boundless just left me puzzled. Is that a turbine? A tunnel of water? And what’s the shell-shaped whorl off to the side?

Ruka began photographing water when she lived in Latvia, in a series later titled It. Each day, she ran a wooded path to the sea, hearing the Baltic’s rustle before she saw it. When she arrived at the shoreline, she’d snap a cellphone picture. It was different every day.

An earlier exhibit of Ruka’s, All the Waves Belong to the Sea at the Latvian Museum of Photography, grew from her reflection on water-related disasters. “All the water is connected, and we are all connected,” she says. “But sometimes we forget that.”

The pieces in Immersion have titles but don’t indicate which body of water they depict — a choice perhaps meant to indicate that ocean names and borders, like national boundaries, are arbitrary.

Ruka’s show reminds us that the relationship between humans and water is reciprocal. Water compels and frightens us; we try (and fail) to harness its power. Wade in, her prints say, but only with consciousness and caution.