JTF (just the facts): A total of 26 photographic collages, displayed unframed under glass against white walls in the main gallery space. All of the works are unique collages made in 2022, each sized roughly 12×12 inches. (Installation and detail shots below.)

A small zine has been published as a catalog to the show, with poetry by Ariana Reines. (Cover shot below.)

Comments/Context: There comes a time in the career of most artists when it feels altogether right to finally jettison all of the artistic influences that have been accumulated over a lifetime and boldly step out into the world with one’s own bare and unguarded self. It’s a potentially risky and often scary moment, especially since all through the early years of an emerging artist’s development, he or she has likely been encouraged to actively soak in ideas, influences, and inspirations from any number of other artists (famous and not). But at some point, as the saying goes, you have to “kill your idols”, and thereby deliberately and cathartically eliminate all those adopted aesthetic styles and behaviors, in the hopes of revealing a more uniquely personal artistic voice.

Now in her mid fifties and with a handful of successful photographic projects under her belt, Justine Kurland doesn’t seem like the kind of artist who might still feel weighed down by the aggregations of history. But we all reach the “I’ve had enough” transition point at different times and in different ways, and back in 2019, after staring at the revered titles in her overstuffed photobook library perhaps one too many times, she embarked on a dramatic purge. She pulled from her shelves the photobooks of white male photographers young and old, and went on to brashly reinterpret each of those books in collage form, literally slicing and dicing the images and creating her own new works from the cuttings. As a break from the photographic past, it was indeed physically and psychologically violent, actively chopping up, dismembering, and destroying her valuable (and perhaps once treasured) books with an energized kind of righteous passion. Her SCUMB Manifesto project, as it came to be called (originally reviewed here, as seen in a 2021 gallery show), was simultaneously a rejection and a reclamation, with an overtly anti-patriarchal feminist perspective brought to the forefront, often in the form of vaginal shapes and even her own name in letters. But in the simplest sense, it was a liberatingly ritualistic step toward hard earned freedom.

Kurland’s collages arrived into the world of contemporary photography with a confident critical swagger that we hadn’t seen in a while, and paired with the ongoing societal struggles around women’s rights and the exhaustion of the white male gaze taking place in the surrounding air, they seemed to prick a nerve. In the years since, Kurland has continued to make more of these destructive/reconstructive collages, extending her reach to more classic photobooks, and in a few cases, making her collages even bigger and more elaborate than some of the more intimate original works (which were initially limited to the dimensions of the source book.)

Given that Kurland did her undergraduate and graduate studies in the United States in the 1990s, it would have been nearly impossible for her to avoid the influence of William Eggleston and the rest of the photographers who had been working in color in the 1970s in America. Since his groundbreaking MoMA show in 1976, Eggleston’s place in the photographic canon has been essentially uncontested, and his effect on younger photographers has been wide ranging, particularly in terms of compositional aesthetics. To many, he has cemented his place as the quintessential Southern photographer of the 20th century. So it is not all surprising that Kurland would have had several Eggleston volumes on her bookshelf when she began her project, nor that a few ended up re-collaged in her first round of works – his was an influence that would need to be reckoned with, above and beyond its obvious white maleness.

Even today, there is a glow of reverent grandeur that hovers around Eggleston’s work that can border on pomposity, and his self-confident Southern persona is perhaps exactly what encouraged Kurland to keep dismantling his imagery. In 2015, Steidl published a massive ten-volume set of Eggleston’s previously unseen work from the 1980s titled The Democratic Forest (here)(not to be confused with an earlier book of the same title), which was accompanied by breathy press-ready statements like “only on this large scale can the magnitude of Eggleston’s achievement be represented.” As a photobook object, it’s a deep dive into some twelve thousand unpublished images from a relatively narrowly defined period in Eggleston’s career, the kind of boxed set designed for committed collectors, libraries, and obsessive supporters, and indeed, there are plenty of consistently superlative photographs to be found in its many pages.

It is this multi-volume beast that provides all the raw material for an entire show of new Kurland collages, all of which are centered on Eggleston’s images of flowers. In many ways, this is a fascinating conceptual choice, both because of the many stereotypically feminine associations of flowers and floral imagery and because Eggleston wasn’t a particularly notable photographer of floral subjects. The press release for this gallery show claims that Kurland excised every single flower from the entire ten-volume set to make these collages, which at first sounds ridiculous given more than a thousand images across the whole package. But Eggleston doesn’t seem to have been that keenly interested in flowers, and certainly didn’t make many isolated floral “portraits” like any number of Modernist or contemporary makers; instead, the flowers in his pictures take many more subtle and mundane mood-setting forms: bouquets, meadows, flowering trees, other tangled greenery, veiled backdrops, even a few vernacular signs. So in a way, in her collages, Kurland is forcing Eggleston’s flowers to the forefront, where he never really placed them himself, hijacking and rebalancing his compositions away from perhaps the masculine of his white Southern male gaze to an inadvertent feminine side.

All of Kurland’s collages use the same general format. She starts with a base page with a floral image from one of the books (complete with page number in the corner) which provides the foundation layer of the collage, and from this page, Kurland has painstakingly removed (i.e. cut out) everything that isn’t the flower or its surrounding natural growth. Then on top of the now-incised page, she has added other floral fragments from other images to create her final compositions, of which there are more than two dozen on view.

My first reaction to these collages was to feel astonished by all of the tediously meticulous time Kurland has invested in X-Acto-knifing each of these Eggleston pages – it must have been an unexpectedly patient and intimate process, and it certainly forced her to spend hours looking at Eggleston’s compositions with care and attention. So while we might assume there was a sort of wickedly fiendish feminist glee taking place as she roughly picked apart and canceled Eggleston, I’m guessing it was something quite a bit more deliberate and drawn out, where each image was examined and critiqued relentlessly, and as a result, Kurland was likely forced to wrestle with Eggleston’s work (and his compositional choices) more systematically than she might have initially expected.

From Eggleston’s florals, Kurland has constructed a series of impossible gardens, where roses bloom amidst thickets of branches and showy orchids float in among fruiting trees. Her compositions reorient Eggleston’s sense of scale and proportion, insert pops of color where he never intended them, and combine scenes into unlikely hybrids and uneasy arrangements, and it is this very awkwardness that feels intentional, as if to break up one kind of visual harmony and replace it with another that offers a critique of what flowers typically represent in the tropes of male-centric photography. Since many of the original Eggleston photographs aren’t exactly well known, there isn’t much “where’s Waldo” recognition and identification that takes place while looking at Kurland’s collages; this adds openness to the resulting works, where we see Eggleston’s overall style being reinterpreted (and recalibrated) rather than specific favorite pictures being reworked.

In general, Kurland’s floral collages feel like repeated exercises in compositional balance, where removals create one kind of imbalance, which is then amplified by additions that change the spatial equation once again. In this way, the collages feel quite brainy, filled with intricate ideas about how foreground and background interact, how empty white space creates its own dynamics, and how interruptions draw our eye one place or another within the confines of the frame. Most of the collages fail to resolve to something we might call harmony; instead they seem to hover in a kind of impermanent in-between state, where the rules of natural reality are bent for just a moment or two and the misty-eyed possession we typically apply to pared down pictures of flowers is intentionally disrupted.

And it is this friction that left me pondering. Was Eggleston just a boring flower photographer, a reality that Kurland couldn’t materially change even by chopping up his compositions? Or was the gender component here more prominent, that as a man Eggleston didn’t take flowers seriously enough as a primary subject, which Kurland has then further amplified into a simmering state of instability? Or did grafting Kurland’s female perspective onto Eggleston’s often inadvertent or atmospheric flowers succeed in giving them more life and complexity than he originally saw? Or was Kurland just intent on brashly shaking up the staid world of photographic flowers, and using Eggleston as her easily manipulated tool? I don’t think these collages provide any easy answers, which is exactly why they may yet prove to be durably intriguing.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced at $1800 each. Kurland’s work has slowly begun to enter the secondary markets in the past few years, with prices ranging from roughly $2000 to $6000.