JTF (just the facts): A total of 15 photographic works, unframed and pinned directly to the wall, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are archival inkjet prints, made in 2014. Physical sizes range from 59×44 to 85×44 (or reverse), and all of the works are unique. The show also includes 2 floor works, made of painted latex and personal lubricant, also made in 2014. These works range in size from 46×72 to 46×104 and are unique. A catalog of the show (with a text by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer) is available from the gallery for $20. (Installation shots below.)

Comments/Context: If you look back at Andrea Longacre-White’s work over the past couple of years, what you’ll find is a slowly simmering bunch of largely discrete ideas: overlapped layers of scanning and rephotography, alternating textures of crispness and digital pixelization, and a wary fascination with technology embodied by smudged iPads and technology ghosts. In her newest show, the stove has been set on extra hot, the ideas mixing and boiling over into a messy often unruly agglomeration with a decidedly physical presence. It’s as if her earlier controlled experiments have been allowed to consciously run wild, aggressively crossing the point of overload.

Up close, Longacre-White’s new pictures are actually constructed of many elements that are familiar from her pervious work: iPads, cords and cables, laptop keyboards, the digital paint gesture of the Epson logo, and various less readily identifiable technology fragments, visually piled on top of each other in uneven shadowy strata. Mixed in among the technology snippets are images of the rough grained floorboards of the gallery and Longacre-White’s studio, giving the compositions a more obvious physicality, connecting them with echoes of the surrounding space. A few are taken further with the addition of sticky black restraint tape (used, often with skin fragments and hair still attached), the large prints becoming more three dimensional and sculptural with these glossy striations, the tape bringing a sense of erotic fetishism to the subject matter.

While Longacre-White’s earlier efforts might have included a simple handful of layers, these works continue the iteration and repetition to the point of collapse, where running image after image through the scanner and inkjet printer becomes something akin to printmaking, the ink piling up into dense blackness. The slash of the Epson logo starts out like a gesture from Franz Kline and then is boldly overwhelmed by imagery, the ink ultimately refusing to adhere to the already oversaturated paper, beading, squiggling, and dripping down the surface like sweat. These are not perfect art object prints behind glass; on the contrary, the paper billows and cracks, and is torn and crumpled by Longacre-White while rubbing it on the floor; her presence is intimately felt in each picture, her process tangible and tactile. The seemingly all black images along one wall require nose to the paper looking, revealing layers of veined floors, interrupted by the wetness of the ink. And the shiny rectangles on the floor, found to be made of latex and personal lubricant, take this physicality one step further, the whole installation feeling greasy and personal.

What I found most intriguing about these works is that Longacre-White has brought a sense of sweaty, sexy intimacy to the typically cerebral, and often emotionally neutered process of conceptual rephotography; she’s added life to an often dry, controlled exercise. She’s also embraced the scanner/inkjet printer combination (a wider discussion of this photographic trend here), and allowed it to wander into a more brusque, physical, perhaps painterly realm. My guess is that we will look back on these works as a turning point in her artistic career, the place where her initial ideas coalesced into a more vital and engaging mode of expression. There is much more authentic energy in these new works, art school cleverness giving way to riskier, more uninhibited explorations.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced between $6000 and $9000, generally based on size. Longacre-White’s work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.