Disembodied limbs curve into black on the walls of the Barrington Area Library. They belong to Kelly Stachura's photographs, eerie and beautiful images of dancers vanishing into movement.

Through May 1, the Barrington resident's latest exhibit, "noir et blanc" is on display at the library in an exhibit curated by the Barrington Area Arts Council.

"Kelly has the ability to catch the movement of dance in its raw, natural form, as opposed to dance as a picture in a posed shot," said Juliet Stephenson, co-owner of the Dance Academy of Libertyville, where Stachura is the staff photographer.

Stephenson isn't the only one beguiled by the 23-year-old Stachura's photographs.

"Noir et blanc" is the sixth solo show Stachura has done. She began exhibiting at galleries in Chicago and suburbia when she was a junior at the Chicago School of the Art Institute. With the Barrington show, Stachura spotlights a series of black-and-white images of women wrapped into poses showing the female form as curves and angles suspended in space.

"This series is about the lines and elements of space," Stachura said. "Stripping away the color, doing these in black and white, was about reducing things to their most elemental form."

The fact that the faces of the women are obscured in the "noir et blanc" photos is no accident.

"These photos are not about a particular person. They're more universal than that. They're about navigating space," Stachura said.

"I think what is inherent through all of my work is the aesthetic I developed growing up around dance and music. I'm not classically trained or influenced; I just find shapes in things. I see things in terms of how they occupy their environment and what their relationship to the space around them is," Stachura said.

Stachura began dancing with ballet classes when she was 3. While she eventually focused more on yoga and visual art forms, Stachura's older sisters (identical twins Heather and Anna, 25) concentrated on dance.

Stachura's shift toward photography picked up momentum when she was a student at Barrington High School, taking beginning photo classes with instructor Jeffrey Dionesotes.

Motion and Stillness

"There's a certain quality to Kelly's photos, whether they are shots of a still scene or of movement," Dionesotes said. "They all have a certain kind of serenity to them. It sounds paradoxical, but it's there in all of them."

"There's a grand old piece of advice, that to make a good photo, you have to know where to stand and where to put the edges, but when you're doing that, you're anticipating the print rather than recognizing the subject matter," he said.

In Stachura's photographs, the technical elements - where to put the edges, where to position the camera - are all in place, but there's also something more, he added.

"In art, what you're creating is not necessarily an accurate, total representation, like a legal document, of a subject. You get the idea of the art within the subject," he said.

That is not to overlook the sheer fun of photography, Stachura said.

Take, for instance, the set-up for her "noir et blanc" shots:

"Basically, my sisters and I tried to bend ourselves in the weirdest possible shapes we could for the photographs. Dance purists would probably cringe, but it was a lot of fun," she said.