Jaimie Warren, The Whoas of Female Tragedy II @The Hole

JTF (just the facts): A total of 33 photographic works, generally framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the multi-room main gallery space. 21 of the works are single image digital c-prints; sizes include 20×24/20×30 (in editions of 8), 30×40 (in editions of 5), and 40×53 (in editions of 3). 11 of the works are digital c-print diptychs, in 20×24/20×30 (edition of 8) and 30×40 (edition of 5) sizes. The final work is a large four panel digital print on canvas mural, sized 8×4 feet. All of the works were made in 2011 and 2012. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: What is it about fine art photography, and perhaps fine art more broadly, that seems to make it immune from the kind of rampant, viral Internet spreading that has overtaken other cultural genres? We now routinely uncover fresh faces in books, music, and videos that have grown up outside the existing “normal” distribution systems and brazenly charge into our consciousness on the back of a tidal wave of social interchange. Aside from a single image photographic meme that flashes and then disappears, or the video phenomenon that was Hennessy Youngman/Jayson Musson, I can’t point to very many examples of artists/photographers who have built a following Gangnam Style. And yet, the Internet is all about disintermediation and connection, so the potential certainly exists for viral exchange, if we can get over the rigidities in how we look at, discuss, share, and ultimately “consume” art.

Against these odds, Jaimie Warren’s photographs feel like kind of work that could create a viral sensation. They swirl together unpretentious humor, sketch comedy goofiness, and an avalanche of pop culture references into images that beg to be forwarded on to your friends. In a smart conceptual inversion, she takes Photoshopped images found on the Internet and then restages them with makeshift sets and costumes (using herself as the primary model), making self-portraits that put her personal stamp on the scavenged cleverness of bored people everywhere. Yoda photoshopped into a leafy Bouguereau gathering of nudes was probably funny to start with, but with Warren sporting big green ears and her friends playing the other roles, the crass campiness is turned up a notch further.

The show combines several different subject matter projects, each built on multiple levels of ridiculous celebrity distortion. Warren’s art history insertions find her naked in a Rembrandt, dressed as Data from Star Trek in a Bellini, or posing as Santa in an Egyptian papyrus. Recreations of breadpeople and food’lebrities memes have her covered in strawberry rainbow sprinkle icing as Madonut, sporting a pastry face as JonBeignet Ramsay, and neck stretched into Pretzel Rod Stewart. Borrowings from totallylooksalike.com pair Warren as Grilled Cheese Virgin Mary and Bernadette Peters, a dog and Shelley Duvall in The Shining, and Female Gremlin and Li’l Kim. Each constructed performance is wacky, imperfect, and low-tech genuine.

Lest my comments come off as a kind of backhanded low culture compliment, there is an entirely different but equally valid review to be written of this show that places Warren in the academic context of Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, centering on performance and female identity, and expanding on the traditions of staged self-portraiture in a celebrity-driven Internet age. But such high minded self-important talk, however well intentioned or thoughtfully reasoned, drains all the life out of these pictures and misses the joy of their oddball absurdity. Photographic humor is surprisingly rare, and Warren’s best pictures deliver unexpectedly layered farce with an endearingly personal touch. Let the contagious forwarding begin.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced as follows, generally based on size. The single image prints range in price from $580 to $3000, the diptychs start at $900 and move up to $1400, and the four panel mural is $7500. Warren’s work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is still likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

 

 

 

Niko Luoma, And Time is No Longer an Obstacle @Bryce Wolkowitz

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 large scale photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung in the entry gallery, the hallway, and the main gallery space in the back. 13 of the works are archival pigment prints, unframed and mounted on Diasec, and made between 2009 and 2012. These prints are sized 67×55 or reverse and are available in editions of 5+2AP. The show also includes 5 smaller archival pigment prints, framed in black and unmatted, and made in 2011. These prints are sized 14×13 and are also available in editions of 5+2AP. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Hatje Cantz (here). This is Luoma’s first solo show in the United States. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: “Drawing with light” is one of those overly mystical honeyed chestnuts I associate with bad writing about photography. But in the case of Finnish photographer Niko Luoma, drawing with light may indeed be an apt description of what he is actually doing. Using an entirely analog process, he methodically exposes his negatives to hundreds of individual lines of light, building up dense thickets of pulsing linear abstraction. His works have faint echoes of Minimalism, iteratively evolved into compositions brimming with futuristic energy.

The smaller works displayed in the hallway of the gallery have the most direct connection to a familiar Minimalist aesthetic. Thin almost invisible white lines arrange themselves with mathematical precision against a dark black background, becoming intimate arrays of horizontal and vertical stripes. It’s easy to see a conceptual kinship with Frank Stella’s black paintings or with Agnes Martin’s delicate strips and bands.

Luoma’s larger works are presented as glossy objects, scaled up in wall power and intensity. Straight school bus yellow lines radiate outward from a criss-crossed center and circular black swirls overlap into a bird’s nest of interlocked basket weave curves. Most of the works play on ram rod straight horizontals and verticals, piled up and layered into symmetrical thatched rectangles and woven angled patterns. Their color is pure and electric, almost as if it is backlit or lasered, from blinding monochrome contrast to intense multicolored lines in rainbow hues. The works feel modern and machined, like the output of code running open loop or a controlled, systematized process that has been allowed to wander.

I think Luoma’s brand of geometric abstraction is full of freshness and vitality. His lines flutter and palpitate with a precise cadence, drawing the viewer into their seemingly endless mathematical repetitions. And it is this mix of brashness and order that gives them their originality and punch, keeping them from becoming something we have seen before.

Collector’s POV:  The works in this show are priced as follows. The large 67×55 prints are $17000 each, and the smaller 14×13 prints are $6500 each. These prices represent a small bump up from prices I have encountered at recent art fairs. Luoma’s work is not yet consistently available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is still likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

 

Thomas Barrow, Works: 1974-2010 @Derek Eller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 photographs and mixed media works, variously framed/matted or unframed, and hung/displayed in the entry area, the main gallery space, and the smaller North gallery. 9 of the works are toned gelatin silver prints made in 1974 or 1975; they are each sized 11×14 and come in editions of 5 or 10. The rest of the works combine toned gelatin silver prints, Polaroids, and photograms with silicone caulk, spray paint, and other found materials; they range in size from 14×12 to 28×25 and are each unique. All of the works on view were made between 1974 and 2010. A monograph of the Cancellations series was recently published by powerHouse Books (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While the current crop of gallery shows has us all thinking about the evolving intersections of photography and sculpture, Thomas Barrow has been experimenting with many of these same ideas for the better part of the last 40 years. This show provides a succinct sampler of his investigations, from a healthy group of works from his Cancellations series from the mid 1970s (for which he is likely best known) to a handful of increasingly three dimensional pieces from each of the following decades. Taken as a whole, it’s an eclectic, uneven body of work, but it certainly provides a broad catalog of original ideas of how the object quality of photographs can be exploited in art making.

When I first encountered Barrow’s Cancellations at AIPAD several years ago, my initial reaction to them was that they seemed conceptually flip, the slashing X across the images a kind of academic joke. But seeing them again here and looking more closely this time, I found them much richer and more intriguing than I had originally understood. The images themselves traverse now familiar 1970s New Topographics ground: roadsides, construction sites, chain link fencing, and ugly strip malls, captured in elegant black and white. Barrow then took his negatives and carved urgent gestural lines across the images, making variations on straight and squiggled Xs (along with a few dark circular dots), often playing against the planes and lines in the underlying image. The effect is two-fold: it’s a bold negation/rejection of the content of the pictures, and it simultaneously transforms the photographs from being windows on a particular suburban landscape into physical objects with a conscious element of surface texture. It’s an unexpected and smart intervention that gives the works a jolt of conceptual vigor.

In the early 1980s, Barrow extended this cancellation idea by physically tearing his photographs into pieces and reassembling them with thick gooey silicon caulk; the effect is even more deconstructed and Matta-Clark incised, the images falling apart and being held together. He then turned to messy overlapped photograms often covered with spray paint, stencils, and attached Polaroids, starting to build up from the flatness of the picture plane with the collaged snapshots. In subsequent works, he has left the safety of the frame entirely for heaps and clusters of Polaroids glued together into squishy agglomerations. Peeping Tom connects images of TV screens, eyes, and faces, while Hare Reliquary heads for overstuffed Joseph Cornell, with a vertical box full of bunnies and marshmallow Peeps, decorated with Polaroids clothes-pinned to the sides. His most recent works are rebus-like bags of random discarded stuff, with photographs just one of the many objects thrown into the visual and cultural blender.

What I like about this show and about Barrow’s work in general is that it isn’t afraid to take risks and cross boundaries. Not all of it entirely succeeds for me, but I am intellectually interested by his fits and starts, his experiments and his innovations. His view of photography is tangled and snarled up, increasingly a part of a media saturated whole rather than an end in and of itself. Those looking for the physical edges of our changing medium would be well advised to dig in and analyze what’s here, as it’s a map of iterative extensions and fanciful speculations.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The prints from the Cancellations series are either $4500 or $5500 each, and the larger, more sculptural works range from $7500 to $9500 each. Barrow’s work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up. Barrow is also represented by Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla (here).

 

 

 

Diana Cooper, My Eye Travels* @Postmasters

JTF (just the facts): A total of 32 photographic works/installations, unframed and adhered directly to the walls, and hung in the entry area and the front and back gallery spaces. 15 of the works are photographs (digital c-prints?), ranging in size from 6×7 to 150×59; these prints are available in editions of 5. The rest of the works are mixed media sculptures/collages, ranging in size from 5×5 to 148×118; these works are either unique or available in editions of 2. All of the works were made in 2012-2013. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: With digital photography now increasingly ubiquitous and malleable as a medium, many artists that have traditionally spent their time exploring the boundaries of other materials have quietly begun to add a camera to their proverbial toolboxes. Given her history, Diana Cooper can in no way be rightfully categorized as a photographer; her previous works have generally lived in the realms of sculpture and installation, with a dash of painting and drawing thrown in for good measure. And yet, in her newest show, every single work is in some shape or form meaningfully photographic, and many are what we might call straightforward prints. It is clear that photography has been wholly absorbed into her artistic practice, offering her new methods for generating patterns and playing with space.
In her large mixed media installations, Cooper uses the flatness of photographs to provide a foundation layer for three dimensional building, where the rich textures of found objects are employed as collaged structural imagery. Pictures of bulbous green moss morph into real Astroturf, while photographs of tactile bales of recycled cans and paper and towers of stacked bins grow into plastic meshes of construction netting and rigid geometric filters and screens. In some cases, the photographs are used in layers of recursive reference, where images of red pipes and mirrors sit underneath physical manifestations of those same objects, pushing on notions of scale and repetition. In others, Cooper is drawn to simple ordered patterns, where candy colored stadium seats are piled into a flattened uneven kaleidoscope of multiplied visual motifs. In every case, the photographs fit seamlessly into her systematic approach to construction, mixing the crispness of man made images with the organic overlapped chaos of her open ended installations.
The rest of the works on view play with the trompe l’oeil properties of photography, adding extra air vents and skylights to the gallery space. Flat security cameras and monitors float on walls and in corners, while a fake security gate is pulled down near the door. She even adds extra metal plates to the floor and jams in a few stand pipes along one wall. Overall, it’s an effective, mind bending manipulation of the space. I didn’t see these photographs as particularly durable stand alone works, but more as if she had made the whole gallery into one big Diana Cooper installation, with the jittering space bending in on itself.
I think there is a fascinating short term difference between contemporary photographers who add sculptural qualities to their work and sculptors who add photographic qualities to theirs. It seems to me that the photographer still tends to see the boundaries of the traditional print as sacred, building up with three dimensional textures and physical collaging/manipulations (“sculptural photography”), while the sculptor tends to see photography as something less fixed, to be employed in the more adaptable and extensible form of digital imagination (“photographic sculpture”). Eventually, I think they’ll both end up in the same place, but for now, the approaches still have an intellectual point of view gap that separates them. Diana Cooper is clearly on the side of the sculptors, less interested in photography as an end point in and of itself, and more concerned with how photographic imagery can be used to extend and enhance her already complex artistic investigations. But those of us interested in the future of photography need to track artists like her, as she’s showing us an alternate path, and one that will ultimately merge with the one we’re following.
Collector’s POV: The works in this show range in price from $1000 for the smallest single image photographs to $40000 for the largest mixed media installations. Cooper’s work has very little secondary market history (and none at all in the markets for photography), so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

Elad Lassry, On Onions

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2012 by Primary Information (here) and distributed by DAP (here). Paperback, 240 pages, with 112 color images. Arranged by Stuart Bailey and includes an essay by Angie Keefer. (Spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: Elad Lassry’s On Onions is the kind of clever photobook that I wish the artist had made earlier in his career, as it would have helped me to find a more obvious entry point into his work. In the past few years, Lassry has become something of a rising star, with the requisite museum group shows, gallery solos, curator favor, and buzz in the press. His color saturated commercial-style still lifes with their matching frames have become an instantly recognizable signature look. And yet, at least for me, Lassry’s photographs have heretofore been a bit of a head scratching mystery – original to be sure, but their seductiveness more often outweighed in my mind by lack of context and a mystifying randomness. I had a hard time trying to decipher their obtuse puzzle, or perhaps there was no puzzle at all and the images were purposefully campy and vapid.

What I like very much about this well designed book is that there is an underlying conceptual framework that holds these particular photographs together. The book balances two sets of imagery (onions and eyes), moving back and forth between the two groups in mixed bunches. Lassry’s deadpan still life onions cover the entire taxonomy of types and colors (white, yellow, brown, red, green, pearl, and sweet) as well as depciting a selection of presentation and knife skills (chopped, sliced, sectioned, halved, peeled, grouped, and bunched). These forms are matched with variations on objectified eyes – contact lenses, arrays of colored lenses, sections of an eye, prosthetic eyes, and multiple black background retina scans that look alarmingly like veined onions or moons.

The parade of right-hand side images is tied together by a wandering meditative essay on tears that is interleaved among the pictures. It’s an eclectic, brainy study, from a story about dysfunctional tear ducts and lacrimal glands to an examination of the different chemical properties of emotional and reflex tears. Along the way, we follow the path of the magical tear that changes a stuffed animal into a real rabbit in The Velveteen Rabbit and track the career of Hollywood director Douglas Sirk and his melodramas of hopeless situations and happy endings. The result is a smart sense of rhythm and wry purpose that was completely absent from my previous encounters with Lassry’s work. It’s not exactly an underlying narrative, but it’s certainly a defining structure that provides logic and meaning to the sequence of pictures. In the end, it’s still a quirky, open-ended project, but for the first time, there is a trail of bread crumbs to follow.

Collector’s POV: Elad Lassry is represented by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles (here). He was included in MoMA’s New Photography exhibit in 2010 (review here), had a show at Luhring Augustine in New York later that year, and recently had one of his images displayed on the High Line billboard.
Transit Hub:
  • Various reviews: NY Times, 2012 (here), LA Times, 2012 (here), Art in America, 2011 (here)

Distance and Desire, Encounters with the African Archive, Part II: Contemporary Reconfigurations @Walther Collection

JTF (just the facts): A group show consisting of total of 26 photographs and 2 videos by 11 different artists/photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung in the main gallery space (with one glass case) and the side book alcove. The works in the show were made between 1994 and 2012. The exhibit was curated by Tamar Garb, and is the second installment of a larger three-part series. (Installation shots at right.)

The following artists/photographers have been included in the show, with the number of works on view and their details in parentheses:

Philip Kwame Apagya (2 chromogenic prints, 1998, 2000)
Sammy Baloji (1 archival digital photograph on satin matte paper, 2006)
Candice Breitz (1 chromogenic print, 1994-1996)
Samuel Fosso (2 chromogenic prints, 1997)
Pieter Hugo (8 archival pigment prints on Warmtone Baryta Fibre paper, 2011, 2012)
Sabelo Mlangeni (4 gelatin silver prints, 2011)
Zwelethu Mthethwa (1 digital c-print, 2010)
Zanele Muholi (1 chromogenic print and 2 lambda prints, 2006, 2007, 2010)
Andrew Putter (1 video installation, 2007)
Berni Searle (1 two channel video projection, 2001)
Carrie Mae Weems (4 chromogenic prints with sandblasted text on glass, 1995-1996)

Comments/Context: In spite of its tucked away location on the 7th floor in the rabbit warren of galleries at 526 West 26th in Chelsea (now with an out of service elevator), the Walther Collection has quietly become one of the best places in the city to see thoughtfully curated, high quality African photography. Over the course of nearly a year, the venue is putting on a three part series of scholarly exhibits that revolve around questions derived from the “African Archive”, the aggregation of photographic imagery (from ethnographic and anthropological studies to tourist snapshots and classic studio portraiture) that makes up the visual history of the region and its people. This show is the second part in this ongoing dialogue and gathers together a smart selection of contemporary works that react to and often undermine the stereotypes and cliches that run through the archival material.

The loosely posed portrait of tribal men and women, bare chested and wearing traditional beads and skins, standing against a background of thatched huts or wide open bush is likely the most common trope of African photography, so it’s not at all surprising that contemporary artists have found countless ways to subvert this genre. Zanele Muholi has substituted androgynous young men for the usual subjects, outfitting them in portions of traditional garb and throwing in a splash of modern cross dressing gender uncertainty. Zwelethu Mthethwa has captured the predictable grassland scene celebrating a religious ceremony, but has documented boys dressed in the kilts of Scottish missionaries rather than the standard loin cloths and spears. Sammy Baloji has collaged together an archival portrait of tribesmen with color landscapes of the ugly hills of mining slag that have replaced the previously unspoiled lands. And Candace Breitz has appropriated a postcard view of a tribal woman and overpainted her skin in ghostly zinc white, highlighting how we might see this kind of image if the skin tones were different.

Staged studio portraiture has been disrupted with equal verve and intelligence. Pieter Hugo darkens the skin of his sitters to the point where the varying skin types all look black, making the old ways of separation and classification impossible. Andrew Putter’s video portrait of a Dutch settler in her headscarf and lacy shawl appears conventional, that is until you put on the headphones and hear her singing a lullaby in Khoikhoi with its clicks and glottal stops. And Samuel Fosso exaggerates the styles of Keïta and Sidibé, dressing himself in a patchwork technicolor dreamcoat with high heels, necklaces, and a cowboy hat, or styles himself as a funky colonial chief, with space age sunglasses, a leather handbag and fancy shoes.

In the best possible way, this is a teaching show. It sets up our inherent biases and derived opinions about African imagery and knocks them down with meticulous well-edited precision, while at the same time exposing us more fully to a diverse and talented group of contemporary African artists who are engaging the past with knowledge and purpose.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a non-commercial space, no prices were available for the works on view. Gallery representation for the various artists (where available) is listed below:

Philip Kwame Apagya: 51 Fine Art Photography (here)
Sammy Baloji: Axis Gallery (here)
Candice Breitz: White Cube (here)
Samuel Fosso: work available at Jack Shainman Gallery (here)
Pieter Hugo: Yossi Milo Gallery (here)
Sabelo Mlangeni: Stevenson Gallery (here)
Zwelethu Mthethwa: Jack Shainman Gallery (here)
Zanele Muholi: Stevenson Gallery (here)
Andrew Putter: Stevenson Gallery (here)
Berni Searle: Stevenson Gallery (here)
Carrie Mae Weems: Jack Shainman Gallery (here)

Sissi Farassat @Edwynn Houk

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against almond colored walls in the main gallery space and the smaller side room. All of the works are chromogenic prints with added tinsel, carpet thread, Swarovski crystals, or sequins, made between 2004 and 2012. Physical dimensions range from roughly 8×10 to 40×60 and each work is unique. This is the artist’s first solo show in New York. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: My first reaction to Sissi Farassat’s show was that it announced the arrival of photographic bling. Her casual snapshot-style photographs are densely encrusted with crystals, sequins, and other sparkly things, grabbing your attention with their flash and daring you to look away from their glamour. They initially seemed pretty and vacuously decorative, especially the ones covered in happy colorful polka dots.

But as I circled the gallery, I started to see what Farassat was doing was not some over-the-top exercise in inane craftiness, but instead an investigation of the boundaries of photographic surface and texture. Her clear sequins let the background show through while breaking it up into overlapping round bits; one might even call it analog pixelization. When the sequins are opaque (in shiny black and silver), the backgrounds are completely obscured, leaving cut out women to pose against swirling Starry Night whorls of geometric complexity. And when the sequins are used in complementary shades of color (greens and blues in one work), the circles crowd into competing bubbles.

Farassat employs carpet threads with equal grace. White fibers act like transparent gauzy lace, echoing a female form silhouetted against a light filled window; those same tiny strands are then transformed into a soft snowstorm when placed over a long dark coat. Green fibers over a garden scene add a layer of wispy, prickly texture, like blowing, scattered evergreen needles. These images are crisp and photographic, but somehow also mysterious and sculptural at the same time. The additions are well integrated and expanding, rather than simply glued on for extra obvious dazzle.

The idea that photographs can have unexpected surface, and that that surface can be augmented and disrupted is exciting. The trick for Farassat will be to consistently find methods and materials that do this in ways that are challenging and surprising rather than cloying and heavy handed. The best of the works on view here prove that she’s headed off in an original direction.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced between $7500 and $18500, based on size and applied material. Farassat’s works have very little secondary market history in the US (there have been a handful of sales in the Austrian auction houses), so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

 

 

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