Who among us — out on an evening stroll, say — hasn’t had the sort of pedestrian encounter with mortality that photographer and University of Texas at Austin instructor Breakey portrays with such aching, indelible beauty in this traveling exhibit? Still, there’s nothing prosaic about Breakey’s pieces. Her petite portraits of exanimate animals and plants — broken-winged birds and belly-up lizards, color-denuded blossoms on fast-bowing stems — are artfully rend-
ered requiems that give lingering meaning to the brief lives of these unhonored dead beneath our feet and our notice. Breakey makes us notice. She shoots her funereal found objects in extreme close-up, enlarges the ensuing prints and — like a postmortem makeup artist armed with a jeweler’s skill — hand-inks the images. Its gorgeous, thoughtful, sometimes spooky work.
HOUSTON PRESS MARCH 5, 1998