Monday, July 30, 2012

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective @Guggenheim

JTF (just the facts): A total of 69 color photographs and 5 videos, variously framed and matted, and hung in a winding series of rooms on the four floors of the annex galleries. All of the photographs are chromogenic prints, made between 1991 and 2009. Physical dimensions and edition information were not available on the wall labels. The show was curated by Sandra Phillips of SFMOMA and Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim. A hardback exhibition catalogue is available the museum shop for $55 (here). (Installation views of Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, June 29–October 8, 2012 at right, courtesy of David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.)

Dijkstra's works can be easily categorized by subject matter. For each series, the title of the series is followed by the number of photographs/videos on view and their details:

Annex 2nd Floor
Beach Portraits: 13 photographs, framed in dark brown and unmatted, 1992-1998
Bullfighters: 4 photographs, framed in dark brown and matted, 1994, 2000
Tia: 2 photographs, framed in light brown and matted, 1994
New Mothers: 3 photographs, framed in light brown and matted, 1994

Annex 4th Floor
Olivier: 7 photographs, framed in dark brown and matted, 2000-2003
Almerisa: 11 photographs, framed in brown and unmatted, 1994-2008
The Buzz Club: 3 photographs framed in brown and unmatted, 1995, 1 2-channel video (26 minutes 40 seconds), 1996-1997
Chen and Efrat: 5 photographs, framed in white and matted, 1999-2005
High School: 1 photograph, framed in white and unmatted, 1994
Self Portrait: 1 photograph, framed in brown and matted, 1991
Annemiek: 1 video (4 minutes), mounted into gallery wall, 1997

Annex 5th Floor
Parks: 8 photographs, alternately framed in brown and matted/unmatted, 1998-2000, 2005-2006
Ruth Drawing Picasso: 1 single-channel HD video (6 minutes 33 seconds), shown in darkened room, 2009
I See a Woman Crying: 1 3-channel HD video (12 minutes), shown in darkened room, 2009

Annex 7th Floor
The Krazyhouse: 4 photographs, framed in white and unmatted, 2008-2009, 1 4-channel HD video (32 minutes), shown in darkened room, 2009
Israeli Soldiers: 7 photographs, framed in brown and matted/unmatted, 1999-2003

Comments/Context: Rineke Dijsktra's brilliant mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim is proof positive of just how consistently smart her twenty year investigation of photographic portraiture has been. In series after series, she has rigorously probed the edges and boundaries of the genre, producing a body of work that shows a continuing progression of increasingly original conceptual innovations. For the first time, I was able to trace the evolution of her underlying ideas, and to see how she has refined and evolved those constructs over time. It's nothing short of a bravura performance, and I came away deeply impressed with the precision of both her observation and her thinking.

Unfortunately, the wacky configuration of the annex rooms at the Guggenheim makes following in her footsteps nearly impossible; the flow of the show is frustratingly broken up by the space again and again. While the exhibit might be characterized as roughly chronological, the limitations of the rooms lead to a few time jumps and misorderings that are distracting. To try to clarify the action, I've created a simple timeline that lists each project/series on view and the years in which Dijkstra made the pictures (small type, I know):


Dijkstra's small self portrait, taken poolside in 1991 after a grueling rehab training session, is the "aha" moment that kicks off her career as an artist and holds the flash of insight that has informed her work ever since. In it, she stands exhausted and unadorned, with an almost feral intensity, unable to pose for the camera or compose herself. For the first time, Dijkstra had found a way to make a portrait of someone with their guard truly down; like Halsman's jump portraits, this is not a fake smile or a pretend posture - it is the real person, open and honest, and it is mesmerizing.

Dijkstra's now iconic Beach Portraits were the first photographs she made building on this newly discovered approach to photographic authenticity. She placed her subjects on the sand at the shoreline, standing in nothing but their bathing suits against the minimal backdrop of the sea and sky. Dijkstra consciously chose adolescent boys and girls for these images, avoiding older people who were already adept at concealing and protecting themselves in front of the camera. The result is a series of pictures that are intimate and personal, mixing timidity with gawky confidence, awkwardness with self-conscious striving. American kids try a little too hard, imitating the curvy pose of a fashion model or the male swagger of long hair and cut off shorts, while the Eastern European kids seem less spoiled, standing unapologetically in their underwear or a dated speedo, fidgeting and looking for a place for their hands. At nearly life size and with a strict attention to detail, the prints offer nowhere to hide; all the imperfections come through. The differences in how these teens present themselves are fascinating sociology, but each one tells the same uncomfortable story of a child trying to figure out who he or she is going to be.

1994 turned out to be an important year in Dijsktra's early career. While working on the Beach Portraits, she was also simultaneously pursuing several other conceptual approaches to getting her sitters to reveal themselves more fully. One was an extension of the idea found in her self portrait: the exhaustion and conflicted emotion of an extreme physical experience. In her series of Bullfighters, she made pictures of the forcados just as they left the ring, their faces bloodied and their brocade jackets sweaty and torn. And in her series of New Mothers, she captured women naked with their newborns, just after they had given birth. In both cases, the portraits are alive with a kind of wide eyed shock, where pain and pride mix together with euphoric intensity. Another approach from this same year involved using an expanded idea of the element of time to uncover changes in a sitter's personality. On a small scale, Dijkstra's portraits of Tia (another new mother) taken five months apart show the minute, barely observable changes taking place, from her hairstyle to the freshness in her eyes. On a larger scale, Dijkstra's multi-year (and ongoing) portrait of Almerisa tracks more complex adaptations. It chronicles both the growth from young girl through teenager to young mother, and the more subtle changes in clothing, appearance, and attitude coming in her transformation from lost refugee to assimilated Dutch citizen.

In this same year, she also began a preliminary investigation of uniforms, via portraits of high school kids in Liverpool, and soon afterward, she expanded and evolved this concept in her first video piece, The Buzz Club. In many ways, this video is the combination of several of Dijkstra's existing conceptual threads, with a few new ideas thrown in for good measure. Club kids stand against a stark white background, dancing, smoking, drinking beers, chewing gum, and making out, while the soundtrack of the techno music thumps overhead. The girls and boys follow obvious patterns in outfitting themselves (thus the connection to "uniforms"): the girls have long hair and wear skimpy, come hither dresses (mostly black), while the boys have shaved heads and sport zipped up tracksuits. Instead of using still frames across time as she had done with Almerisa, Dijkstra has transitioned to video, creating a "moving" portrait that waits to uncover moments when authenticity intermittently shines through the role playing. Music is used as device to both relax the sitter and as something to focus on and get lost in; dancing becomes a way to break down the formality of the session. The overall effect is a swirling mix: shyness, boredom, swaying and hip shaking, bobbing heads and punching arm moves, staring down the camera and looking away in a trance. It's an exercise in controlled appearances (slinky females, tough guy males) and the split second breaking down of inhibitions.

Through the end of the decade, Dijkstra continued to refine many of her original ideas: Annemiek was another video piece, where a lip synching girl in braces timidly alternates between being painfully self-conscious and being absorbed by the music, and the Parks series used calm groups of young people in leafy natural settings to look for glimpses of honest connection. Three new projects dominated the first years of the next decade and further evolved the time-based concepts from the Almerisa-series, but with a tighter focus on people undergoing a specific life-changing process or rite of passage. Twin sisters (Chen and Efrat) are followed year to year through puberty (with an echo of Nixon's The Brown Sisters), young enlisted recruits in the Israeli army are seen side by side in their army uniforms and later in civilian clothes, and a young man in the French Foreign Legion (Olivier) is followed from his first day (and his subsequent military haircut) through to his emergence as a hardened, serious soldier three years later. In each series, nuanced shifts in maturity can be seen only by comparing the adjacent portraits; we see their emotions and personalities shining through in the cracks.

Dijkstra's most recent works have once again returned to video, pushing further toward moments of intense concentration to look for unguarded personal revelations. In both Ruth Drawing Picasso and I See a Woman Crying, Dijkstra follows school children as they participate in art exhibitions. In their grey sweaters and red ties (uniforms as a motif once again), they engage the art through drawing and group discussion, and in both cases, the action starts out slow and tentative and builds to a crescendo of intense fixation and inventive, exuberant brainstorming, where hidden individual personalities start to take shape. The Krazyhouse reprises many of the the themes from The Buzz Club, but narrows down to explore the intensity of dancing more deeply. As I said in my original review of 2010 show at Marian Goodman (here), this is one of the most exciting pieces of contemporary art made so far in this century. Each of the longer length portraits of the five club goers has something to slowly reveal, and there is contagious joy to be found in the thrashing hair, the ecstatic air guitar, the sultry swing of arms, the frenetic chopping of hands, and the biggest smile you've seen in ages (not that any of the dumbfounded deadpan drones watching the video in the museum while I was there seemed to notice). Each dancer finally gives in to the music, lets go, and the flimsy walls of controlled self-presentation come down in triumphant warmth; it's hard not to be amazed and inspired by such an intimate spectacle.

What I found most impressive about this consistently superlative body of work is how Dijkstra's underlying ideas about the nature of portraiture have been evolving. While much has been made of her historic ties to Sander and Arbus, I think Dijkstra's portraits start with these influences and then quickly move somewhere new. There is an enormous amount of experimentation and innovation visible here, all of it closely clustered around the challenge of getting people to show their true selves. Look closely and there are half a dozen important and original ideas: the aftermath of an intense experience, elapsed time and personal adaptation, the use of video as a patient way to let hidden nuances reveal themselves, uniforms and how personalities are influenced by them, the trance inducing power of music and how to incorporate it into portraiture, etc. etc. Don't be fooled by the seemingly endless stream of classic-looking portraits - there are as many pyrotechnics to be seen here as in any photographic show in recent memory. For me, this retrospective helped me to see the entire spread of Dijkstra's genius (not just her greatest hits) and to more fully appreciate just how much she has successfully challenged and expanded the traditions of photographic portraiture.

Collector's POV: Given this is a museum retrospective, there are, of course, no posted prices. Dijkstra's photographs have become generally available in the secondary markets in the past few years, with prices ranging from roughly $4000 to $180000, with a sweet spot between $10000 and $50000. Dijkstra is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York (here), Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin (here) and Galerie Jan Mot in Brussels (here).

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Reviews: NY Times (here), Village Voice (here), Wall Street Journal (here), New Yorker (here), American Photo (here), TimeOut New York (here), Capital New York (here)
  • Interview: ARTINFO (here)
  • Exhibit: SFMOMA, 2012 (here)
Through October 8th

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue 
New York, NY 10128

Thursday, July 26, 2012

The Checklist: 7/26/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Spies in the House of Art: Met: August 26: review
TWO STARS: Heinrich Kuehn: Neue Galerie: August 27: review
ONE STAR: Naked before the Camera: Met: September 9: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: A Short History of Photography: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Christer Strömholm: ICP: September 2: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Taryn Simon: MoMA: September 3: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

THREE STARS: Richard Avedon: Gagosian: July 27: review
ONE STAR: Adi Nes: Jack Shainman: July 28: review
ONE STAR: Barbara Kasten/Justin Beal: Bortolami: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Zoe Strauss: Bruce Silverstein: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Holly Zausner: Postmasters: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Joni Sternbach: Rick Wester: August 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Alfred Leslie: Janet Borden: July 27: review
ONE STAR: The Permanent Way: Apexart: July 28: review
ONE STAR: John Houck: KANSAS: August 4: review
ONE STAR: Scott B. Davis: Hous Projects: September 1: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Rising Dragon: Katonah Museum of Art: September 2: review
TWO STARS: Hank Willis Thomas: Aldrich: September 30: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

No sales at this time.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

A Short History of Photography @ICP

JTF (just the facts): A total of 110 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung against greenish grey walls in a series of three rooms on the upper level of the museum (a few additional images can be found in the cafe on the lower level). A glass case in the second room contains a variety of photographic albums, contacts sheets, magazine covers and other ephemera. All of the works on view come from the museum's permanent collection and were made between 1865 and 2009. The show was curated by Brian Wallis. (Installation shots at right © International Center of Photography, 2012. Photographs by John Berens.)

The following photographers have been included in the exhibit, with the number of prints on view, process details and image dates as background information:

First Room
Adam Schreiber: 1 inkjet print, 2009
Unidentified: 4 tintype prints, 1865, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1 albumen print, 1865, 1 gelatin silver print diptych, 1880
Eugene Atget: 2 albumen prints, 1913, 1922
Ilse Bing: 1 gelatin silver print, 1936
Walker Evans: 1 gelatin silver print, 1936
Andre Kertesz: 1 gelatin silver print, 1919
Baron Adolph de Meyer: 1 photogravure, 1909
Edward Steichen: 1 gelatin silver print, 1930
Roman Vishniac: 1 gelatin silver print, 1935-1938
Ralph Eugene Meatyard: 1 gelatin silver print, 1963
Edward Weston: 1 gelatin silver print, 1941
Yasumasa Morimura: 1 silver dye bleach print, 1998

Second Room
Miroslav Tichy: 1 gelatin silver print, n.d.
Andre Kertesz: 1 gelatin silver print, 1927
Francesca Woodman: 1 gelatin silver print, 1976
Alessandra Sanguinetti: 1 silver dye bleach print, 1998-2002
Henri Cartier-Bresson: 1 gelatin silver print, 1933
Carl Van Vechten: 1 gelatin silver print, 1954
Irving Penn: 1 gelatin silver print, 1948
Danny Lyon: 1 gelatin silver print, 1964/2006
Christer Strömholm: 1 gelatin silver print, 1959/1965-1966
Philippe Halsman: 1 gelatin silver print, 1966
Cindy Sherman: 1 gelatin silver print, 1999
Chim (David Seymour): 1 gelatin silver print, 1948
John Paul Filo: 1 gelatin silver print, 1970
Vik Muniz: 1 gelatin silver print, 1995
Charles Moore: 1 gelatin silver print, 1963
Ernest Withers: 1 gelatin silver print, 1968/2006
Susan Meiselas: 1 chromogenic print, 1978
Gilles Peress: 1 gelatin silver print, 1972
Cornell Capa: 1 gelatin silver print, 1955
Shirin Neshat: 1 silver dye bleach print, 2002
John Gutmann: 1 gelatin silver print, 1941
Unidentified: 1 gelatin silver print, 1936, 1 gelatin silver print/offset lithograph collage, 1950s
William Hartshorn: 1 gelatin silver print, 1972
Maurice Tabard: 1 gelatin silver print, 1932
Suzanne Opton: 1 chromogenic print, 2004
An-My Lê: 1 gelatin silver print, 2003-2004
Eugene Smith: 2 gelatin silver prints, 1944, 1948
Josef Koudelka: 1 gelatin silver print, 1964
Gordon Parks: 1 gelatin silver print, 1952
Harry Callahan: 1 gelatin silver print, 1948
Brett Weston: 1 gelatin silver print, 1937
Josef Sudek: 1 gelatin silver print, 1948-1964

Glass Case (in Second Room)
Unidentified: 1 album of gelatin silver prints, 1910, 3 gelatin silver prints, 1929, 1960, 1 magazine cover, 1929
Mary B. Huslig: 1 album of gelatin silver prints, 1927-1933
Elliott Erwitt: 1 album of gelatin silver prints, 1950-1955
Robert Capa: 1 gelatin silver contact sheets, 1938
Andy Warhol: 2 gelatin silver photobooth strips, 1964/1965
El Lissitizky: 1 book cover, 1933
John Heartfield: 1 photo montage magazine cover, 1934
James Abbe: 1 magazine cover, 1931

Third Room
Larry Burroughs: 1 gelatin silver print, 1965
Margaret Bourke-White: 1 gelatin silver print, 1945
Robert Capa: 2 gelatin silver prints, 1935, 1944
Unidentified: 1 inkjet print, 2003
Thomas James Howard: 1 gelatin silver print, 1928
Samuel Shere: 1 gelatin silver print, 1937
Mitch Epstein: 1 chromogenic print, 2004
William Christenberry: 1 pigment print, 1978/2009
Marco Breuer: 1 chromogenic print, 2009
Richard Prince: 1 chromogenic print, 1983
Stephen Shore: 1 chromogenic print, 1974/2000
William Eggleston: 1 inkjet print, 1999-2000
Helen Levitt: 1 chromogenic print, 1980
Louise Lawler: 1 silver dye bleach print, 1993
Robert Adams: 1 gelatin silver print, 1976
Robert Smithson: 1 gelatin silver print, 1970
Roman Vishniac: 1 gelatin silver print, 1935-1938
Samuel Fosso: 1 gelatin silver print, 1977
Carrie Mae Weems: 1 gelatin silver print, 1987
Martha Rosler: 24 gelatin silver prints, 1974-1975
David Seidner: 1 gelatin silver print, 1980
Larry Clark: 1 gelatin silver print, 1971
Gerda Taro: 1 gelatin silver print, 1937
Bruce Davidson: 1 gelatin silver print, 1959
Robert Frank: 1 gelatin silver print, 1955/1975

In Downstairs Cafe
Charles Stacy: 1 gelatin silver print, 1913
Aaron Siskind: 1 gelatin silver print, 1939
Fazal Sheikh: 1 gelatin silver print, 1997
Sheng Qi: 1 chromogenic print, 2000
Hank Willis Thomas: 1 chromogenic print, 2004
Simon Norfolk: 1 chromogenic print, 2003

Comments/Context: The ICP's tribute show for outgoing director William "Buzz" Hartshorn gathers together a diverse mix of its institutional roots in documentary photography and photojournalism, a highlight reel of its recent exhibitions, and a parade of permanent collection acquisitions, telling an indirect story of the museum's evolution during the past two decades. As a history of photography (even a "short" one), it falls short of being comprehensive or particularly robust, but as a history of how the ICP has seen photography, I think it's a pretty useful exercise in hindsight.

It goes without saying that any such exhibit at the ICP would contain a heavy dose of classic photojournalism, and of course, this show delivers on that score. Robert Capa, Cornell Capa, Chim, Taro, Cartier-Bresson, Bourke-White, Eugene Smith, Peress, Meiselas, they all make their expected appearances. But from this core point of view, there is a sense of looking outward and finding contemporary connections to this material: John Paul Filo's Kent State shooting flanked by a Vik Muniz conceptual reworking of the same scene, iconic Eugene Smith WWII images matched with recent soldering pictures by An-My Lê and Suzanne Opton, Bourke-White concentration camp victims and Robert Capa D-Day shots put together with prisoner images from Abu Ghraib. The museum is clearly interested in how photographic approaches are changing, and how these new viewpoints relate to its historic classics.

In the period falling before the museum's core holdings (and encompassing nearly the entire 19th century), the approach seems to have been primarily historical, with an emphasis on vernacular imagery, found photographs, and other examples of documentary evidence. In more recent times, the strategy seems more diffuse, with a little of this and a little of that: some large color, some conceptual work, some abstraction, some international breadth. The show tries to tie these together on the walls via a few visual and thematic echoes, but the overall effect for the contemporary work is less coherent. This isn't to discount the quality of the work in any way; I certainly enjoyed the Martha Rosler grid of 1970s Bowery storefronts littered with liquor bottles mixed together with an exhaustive taxonomy of synonyms for "drunk" as well as other gems from Eggleston, Levitt, Weems, Shore, Christenberry and Frank. Mostly, I think the contemporary "mixed bag" feel is evidence of a museum with a limited acquisitions budget trying its best to be everywhere at once.

In a summertime season full of group shows, I think this exhibit will be best enjoyed by those with appropriate expectations. This show doesn't deliver a scholarly reasoned argument or an elaborate historical lesson. Instead it is a thoughtfully selected, well edited, eclectic jumble, with enough classics and unexpected choices to keep things lively.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices, and given the wide range of artists and work on view, I'm going to forgo my usual collector-driven price analysis.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Features/Reviews: Le Journal de la Photographie (here), ARTINFO (here), Prison Photography (here)
1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Monday, July 23, 2012

Hank Willis Thomas: Strange Fruit @Aldrich

JTF (just the facts): A total of 4 color photographs and 1 video, alternately framed in black and white and unmatted, and hung in small single room space in the ground floor of the museum. The photographs are all digital c-prints, ranging in size from 60x29 (in editions of 5+1AP) to 35x96 and 65x96 (in editions of 3+1AP). The video runs for 5 minutes, and is available in an edition of 3+1AP. All of the works were made in 2011. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Hank Willis Thomas' newest works pack a wallop in terms of emotional intensity. Mixing the visual language and loaded symbols of slavery with those of modern day professional sports, his stylized images of football and basketball force a dialogue about what kind of options are really available for many contemporary African-American males. They draw uncomfortable, stark parallels, and imply an overlooked, discouraging interchangeability between history and the present.

In both the video and in two of the single photographs, Thomas replaces a traditional basketball hoop with the hanging rope of a noose. Classically beautiful and muscular bodies jostle in one on one and two on two matchups, with layups, jump shots and thundering dunks aimed at the circular rope. A haunting crescendo of musical chants, hums and work songs simmers in the background. Many plays end with one player soaring and dunking through the noose, only to be left hanging alone against the empty blackness, dangling from the rope instead of the rim. The triumphant sporting spectacle has been turned into a lynching (thus the reference to the Billie Holiday song in the exhibition title), where elegant, powerful athleticism has been overcome by prejudice and horror, turning the the whole event into an ugly form of entertainment.

Thomas uses the trappings of football with equal ironic harshness. A man picking cotton squares off with a lineman in football pads, one crouching in the dirt to gather the crop, the other crouching in the perfect green grass ready to play. In another image, a player flies through the air diving for the goal line like a wide receiver, only to be held up short by a rusty chain around his ankle that shackles him to the first down marker. The implication is clear: are these highly paid professional athletes much different than the field workers of old? Aren't they equally slaves to larger cultural forces? How much has really changed?

The pared down simplicity that Thomas employs in these set pieces turns them into vivid allegories. I like the strong masculinity of the images, and the clear replacement of one form of indentured service for another; his contrasts and comparisons are up front and easily legible, making them much harder to ignore. While this is a small show, it is filled with unforgettable images, ones that ask hard questions and force unflinching examination. This isn't opaque, incomprehensible art about art - it's in your face art that smartly uses the lens of our history, challenging the viewer to see the realities of our contemporary world in the sometimes grim and dissonant context of what has come before.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices. Thomas' work is not yet consistently available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for interested collectors. Thomas is represented in New York by Jack Shainman Gallery (here).

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Exhibit: Corcoran, 2011 (here)
  • Interview: Art Nouveau (here)
Hank Willis Thomas: Strange Fruit
Through September 30th

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
258 Main Street
Ridgefield, CT 06877

Friday, July 20, 2012

Scott B. Davis, Black Sun @Hous Projects

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 black and white photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the entry and the space to the right as you exit the elevator. All of the works are platinum palladium prints made between 2008 and 2012. The prints are each sized 21x26, and are available in editions of 5. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Black is the overwhelmingly dominant color in Scott B. Davis' night photographs of Southern California suburban darkness. It's a rich, tactile black (enabled by the platinum palladium process he uses) that engulfs the neighborhoods and desert scrublands, swallowing them up in a deep, textural sable that is broken only by lonely shafts and pools of dimly penetrating light. It's a world not unlike Robert Adams' Summer Nights, but even darker and more obscure.
.
In many of Davis' pictures, a ghostly subject emerges from the thick blackness, reluctantly called out by the encroaching light: the pock marked, rusted out trunk of a car, a dock covered in crusted salty residue, the white painted rocks that edge a driveway, a cluster of small white bush flowers that float like pinpricks or fireflies. In others, nocturnal suburban neighborhoods and transitional spaces echo in silence: the bright reflected light on the side of weedy alleyway shed, a water tower looming in the darkness (with a nod to George Tice), a VW bus parked in the street, an empty intersection bathed in the cone of light of a single streetlamp.

While we've seen pictures like these before, Davis' technical control of the dark end of the spectrum is certainly impressive. His blacks are lustrous and detailed, dense and mysterious, bringing forth the adventure and insecurity lurking in the shadows.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $4500 each. Davis' work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Interview: LENSCRATCH (here)
Scott B. Davis, Black Sun
Through September 1st

Hous Projects
31 Howard Street
New York, NY 10013

Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Checklist: 7/19/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Roger Mayne: Gitterman: July 21: review
ONE STAR: Spies in the House of Art: Met: August 26: review
TWO STARS: Heinrich Kuehn: Neue Galerie: August 27: review
ONE STAR: Naked before the Camera: Met: September 9: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Christer Strömholm: ICP: September 2: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Taryn Simon: MoMA: September 3: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Matthew Brandt: Yossi Milo: July 20: review
ONE STAR: Image Object: Foxy Production: July 20: review
THREE STARS: Richard Avedon: Gagosian: July 27: review
ONE STAR: Adi Nes: Jack Shainman: July 28: review
ONE STAR: Barbara Kasten/Justin Beal: Bortolami: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Zoe Strauss: Bruce Silverstein: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Holly Zausner: Postmasters: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Joni Sternbach: Rick Wester: August 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Peter Freeman: July 20: review
ONE STAR: Alfred Leslie: Janet Borden: July 27: review
ONE STAR: The Permanent Way: Apexart: July 28: review
ONE STAR: John Houck: KANSAS: August 4: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Rising Dragon: Katonah Museum of Art: September 2: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

No sales at this time.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Zoe Strauss, 10 Years: A Slideshow @Silverstein

JTF (just the facts): A total of 229 color photographs, displayed as a continuous slideshow (roughly 30 minutes long) in the darkened main gallery space. These images were made between 2001 and 2010. The show also includes 25 color photographs (and a map) of Strauss' installation of the work under the I-95 interstate highway in Philadelphia; these prints are unframed and tacked to the wall in a cluster in the front gallery. A single finished print, framed in white and unmatted, is hung on the wall outside the slideshow; it is sized 18x27 and is uneditioned. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: In this age of increasingly short attention spans, few contemporary photographers commit themselves to sustaining a single artistic project for an entire decade. What is lost in this manic flitting from one thing to the next is the steady accumulation of ideas that only becomes evident when we slow down and take a long view. Change, in the broadest sense, nearly always happens in increments too small to notice at the time and patterns don't emerge until we can stop for a moment to look back and see the repetitions. The power of the long term project is in its ability to provide rich, layered persepctive and to get much further into the hidden details than a cursory examination normally allows.

Zoe Strauss' decade long study of her South Philadelphia neighborhood (as well as other locales across America) tells the story of everyday life in our 21st century urban communities. Mixing straightforward documentation of the people and events around her with more abstract pictorial exercises, the body of work moves back and forth between various thematic threads and compositional approaches. It charts the the decay and disuse in her particular section of town (but common to many of our older cities), follows the dynamics of repeated waves of new immigrants as they are absorbed into the social fabric, and finds emblems of the daily struggle we now associate with the Bush years. The slideshow on view represents the final edit of the entire integrated project, merging old and new photographs and carefully sequencing them to reinforce refrains and harmonies.

Strauss' portraits of friends, neighbors and strangers cover an emotional landscape from weariness to proud defiance and from anxiety to everyday joy. In many cases, her pictures are startlingly direct and quietly poignant: a girl's evil looking puffy black eye, a woman holding a dead bird, a man with a pistol, a boy exuberantly flipping upside down onto a pile of mattresses in the street. In others, tiny details anchor a face (a squiggling curl of hair, pierced ears that have been stripped, missing front teeth, a hairnet) while scars (suicide, c section, heart surgery), tattoos, severed digits and bloody injuries provide other forms of personal identification.

Like Walker Evans before her, Strauss also has a fondness for vernacular American signage, particularly the one liner which has been made unintentionally ironic by its surroundings or condition. There's Let's Roll! next door to the depression clinic, POWER in bright lights with the P burned out, Satisfaction Guaranteed reduced to a ghost of itself, and the crumpled arches of a McDonalds sign. If the pessimism of the emotional landscape of the times has somehow been forgotten, Keep the fuck out! and This is your warning help to bring back the simmering harshness with heavy immediacy. Other pictures delve into more formal architectural geometries and Eggleston-like studies of color. Ice covered stairs flank a blue wall, a house is split down the middle into pink and white halves, and red horizontal stripes cover adjacent buildings. Colors pop in images of an electric green ceiling, red carpeted stairs, and the competing dress patterns in a butcher shop. A pile of pillows and a wilted corsage become elegant still lifes. Part of what makes Strauss' work so strong is its familiar looseness; compared with other successful photography documenting the same period (Soth, Epstein, Ulrich etc.), her images are grittier and more immediate, even when they are highly structured.

For an otherwise excellent body of work, my one complaint is that the slideshow format of this exhibit severely undermines its ultimate impact. The images click by, making it impossible to return to them later to savor their details or to orient them in a chronological progression. While I liked the sense of thematic variation and repetition that was apparent, the overall effect of the darkened room experience was underwhelming and vaguely dissatisfying. This is a big gallery space with lots of nooks and crannies; it could have easily held a decent sample of the project, especially if the prints were double hung, gridded, or otherwise clustered. Or maybe the slideshow should have run in the smaller far back room as an adjunct to a more formal presentation. While I watched the show, most people came in, sat down for a dozen slides or so, and then gave up. If the gallery had been filled with prints (instead of feeling largely empty), the experience of the project would likely have been more fully representative of the high quality of the work.

All in, this is a remarkably strong and consistent photographic project, with plenty of subject matter and stylistic breadth. Across the years and along the way, Zoe Strauss has refined her talents and honed her craft, emerging what likely seems like a lifetime later with a sharp and original eye. Based on the merits of the work alone, this show easily deserves a higher rating. But given its suboptimal installation, I was left wishing for a different and more triumphant summation.
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Collector's POV: The main slideshow on display here is not for sale. Strauss' prints apparently come in three sizes: roughly 8x12, 12x18, and 18x27, all uneditioned. The largest size (like the one framed print on view) is priced at $3600; I didn't get the details for the other smaller sizes. Strauss' work has not yet reached the secondary markets with any regularity, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Exhibit/Catalog: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012 (here and here)
  • Reviews: NY Times (here), Bloomberg (here)
Through August 3rd

Bruce Silverstein Gallery
535 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Christer Strömholm, Les Amies de Place Blanche @ICP

JTF (just the facts): A total of 26 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against grey walls in a single room gallery space on the lower level of the museum. All of the works are lifetime gelatin silver prints lent by the estate, taken between 1955 and 1968. No dimension or edition information was provided for any of the works on view. A glass case in the center of the room contains 4 gelatin silver prints, 3 contact sheets, 4 books, 1 catalogue, and 1 address book. A catalog of the exhibition is available from the museum for $55 (here). (Installation shots at right © International Center of Photography, 2012. Photographs by John Berens.)

Comments/Context: Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm has long been well known in European photography circles, but his exposure here in the United States has generally been limited to the circulation of his sought after photobooks. The ICP has taken a first step toward ameliorating this situation by giving Strömholm his first US museum show, a one room summary of his best known body of work - the transgendered and cross dressing men of Place Blanche in Paris from the late 1950s and early 1960s. It's a classic example of a well executed photo essay or tightly self contained project.

The reason that these images have been so well received over the years is that they are built on the combination of trust and empathy that is the hallmark of nearly all superlative portraiture. Strömholm captures his subjects in bars and on nighttime street corners, lounging in hotel rooms or vamping for the camera, consistently finding moments that waver between aspiration and vulnerability. There are confident blonde bombshells, beehive wigs, sultry looks with an excess of mascara, and plenty of fur coats. For the most part, he sees his "women" as they want to be seen, and does so with a sense of respect for their complicated lives (physically and psychologically) rather than with a leering voyeurism. He moves through their environment with the acceptance of an insider, tenderly documenting supportive friendship, best efforts, and haunting insecurity. The desire for a different future, regardless of its costs, can be found in nearly every picture, but the path to this self-determination has clearly been anything but easy.

Admirers of Arbus and Goldin (who both came later) will find much to connect with in this group of photographs. There is a similar unvarnished consideration for the uniqueness to be found in those outside the mainstream and an authentic, up-close attentiveness to their struggles and overlooked triumphs. In the dark, gritty streets of the Paris red light district, Strömholm has reaffirmed the basic human freedom to define one's own identity, and his pictures remain a solid example of how a carefully constructed photo essay can capture the spirit of people quietly striving for a different way of life.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices. Strömholm's work has only been intermittently available at auction in the past decade, with prices ranging from $1000 and $5000. The artist/estate is represented in New York by Marvelli Gallery (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Estate site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), Wall Street Journal (here), New Yorker Photo Booth (here), Le Journal de la Photographie (here)
1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Monday, July 16, 2012

Barbara Kasten and Justin Beal: Constructs, Abrasions, Melons and Cucumbers @Bortolami

JTF (just the facts): A paired show of works by Barbara Kasten and Justin Beal; since Beal's works (cast aluminum sculptures and wall objects) are not photographs, they have been omitted from the discussion. Kasten's works can be divided into three chronologically based groups (installation shots at right):
  • 3 cyanotypes, framed in white and unmatted, each 30x40, from 1975
  • 11 Polaroids, framed in white and matted, either 10x8 (in editions of 7 or 10) or 24x20 (in editions of 8, 9, or 10), from 1980 and 1981
  • 3 archival pigment prints, framed in white and unmatted, 50x40 (in editions of 5), from 2009 and 2011
Comments/Context: Given that she has been thoughtfully exploring the realms of photographic abstraction for the better part of four decades now, Barbara Kasten is one of those photographers that still somehow seems underrepresented in our contemporary dialogue. So it was with some excitement that I came across this pairing at Bortolami, which brings together a mini sampler of works from across her career, including some brand new pieces.

Kasten's early cyanotypes from the 1970s combine a Bauhaus mindset with a deeper investigation of the diaphanous nature of light. Using a thin woven sheet reminiscent of airy gauze or screen door, her compositions capture highlights as they glance across the folds and ripples of the drapery, making patterns like waves of sand dunes or refractions of light on water. They are crisp and delicate, eschewing blurring to create softness and instead letting the gossamer texture of the cloth take center stage.

Her 1980's constructions have a decidedly Duran Duran vibe, with a bright New Wave palette and lots of jutting angles. But perhaps a more serious and appropriate context for these works would be a dialogue with the Light and Space artists (Turrell, Irwin, Wheeler, et al). Kasten's sculptural images from this period are full of mirrors and lines, recalibrations of space, experiments with light coming from different angles, and illusionistic reflections where light and color are carefully managed. Certain compositions also recall Constructivism, with interlocked steel bars, slashing lines, primary shapes broken into component parts, and hard edged geometries flattened from three dimensions into two. Even though some of these abstractions feel dated, their sophistication as structural exercises is undeniable.

Kasten's recent works have become darker and more minimal, moving to a monochrome palette and employing more transparent plates of glass, plexi, or resin. Light is still the principal actor in the works, but the number of variables has been reduced; simple lines and edges have come to the forefront. For the first time, there is also a sense of imperfection, of scuffs and scratches that abrade the surface or jagged broken edges that saw across the picture plane. Layers of transparency amplify these flaws, creating distorted shadows and hazed rubbings. In the end, these works are much less showy and eye catching than those from the 1980s, but more refined and clear when examined with patience. 

Given the current vogue for photography of sculptural constructions made solely to be photographed, Kasten is due for a critical reappraisal. Not only are her compositions (old and new) more complex than most of this new crop of work, her evolution as an artist may provide an important set of connections between today's trend and various historical precedents we have previously overlooked.

Collector's POV: While I never actually saw a detailed price list for this exhibit, I was told that the Kasten works were priced between $6500 and $25000; I didn't inquire about the Beal works. Kasten's photographs have only been sporadically available in the secondary markets in the past decade, with only a few lots coming up for sale in any given year. Prices for those sales (which may not be entirely representative of market for her best work) ranged between $1000 and $4000.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Interview: Frieze (here)
Barbara Kasten and Justin Beal: Constructs, Abrasions, Melons and Cucumbers
Through August 3rd

Bortolami Gallery
520 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011

Friday, July 13, 2012

Holly Zausner, A Small Criminal Enterprise @Postmasters

JTF (just the facts): A total of 20 photographic works and 1 film, generally framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the entry area, the front and back gallery spaces, and the studio area. The super 16mm film, entitled Unseen, has a running time roughly 17 minutes and is available in an edition of 5+2AP; it was made in 2007. The other works are unique photo collages constructed from images/stills from the film, each collage made between 2009 and 2012. Physical dimensions range from 15x20 to 60x90 (or reverse). There are 18 single work collages and 1 diptych on view. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The large photographic image made up of thousands of tiny images as stand ins for pixels has now become a digital era cliche. While countless artists have explored this approach (Rashid Rana and Alex Guofeng Cao are just two of many), the juxtaposed ironies of this method have now become too obvious and predictable; the novelty has worn off and I'm sure it will only be a matter of time before a software filter will exist to turn family snapshots into my own personal digital mosaics. With the inevitable dumbing down of this trend running as backdrop, Holly Zausner's shrewd new photo collages come as even more of a surprise.

The best way to comprehend this show is to start with the short film running on a video screen in the back room. In it, Zausner drags oversized elongated alien-looking bodies (alternately in blue and yellow) through the wide streets of Berlin, her heels clicking rhythmically as she wanders through empty sidewalks and seemingly abandoned train stations, carefully cradling the heads of her soft passengers. Her ceaseless travels take her to a decaying amusement park (toppled dinosaurs, rusty roller coasters), factories churning out newspapers and loaves of bread, and the sculpture garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie, where a menacing tiger inexplicably prowls among the reflecting pools and the hedges. Her ultimate destination is a quiet room filled with Baroque statues at the Bode Museum, where she is finally able to deposit her cargo, the blue form splayed on the floor in well deserved rest.

Starting with film stills and images from this stylized performance (in both positive and negative, black and white and color), she proceeds to do just the opposite of all the other digital stitchers: she doesn't collage them into some larger recognizable image which we will find clever, but instead arranges them into increasingly abstract compositions that swirl and stutter like static. In fact, she actually meticulously pastes them together image by image, foregoing the simplicity of scans for the hand craftedness of highly organized grids. The most logical antecedent here is really Ray Metzker's masterful composites, although Zausner seems more interested in allowing the underlying images to devolve into something illegible. In some cases, her large abstractions are found to be made of photographic blurs and smears of color, frustrating our ability to connect the intention back to the original film.

What we're left with is an open-ended, metaphorical story that then becomes even more obscure as it is translated into skittering, all-over collages. The works don't converge toward an overly simple reading, but instead diverge into something diffuse and fractal. It's as if the farther we delve into Zausner's symbolic narrative, the more it reveals itself as unknowable.
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Collector's POV: The collages in this show are priced based on size, as follows.
  • 15x20: $3500 each
  • 20x30: $5000
  • 20x30 diptych: $6000
  • 40x60 (or reverse): $15000 each
  • 60x90 (or reverse): $25000 each
The film is priced at $15000. Zausner's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Interview: Brooklyn Rail (here)
  • Feature: BOMB (here)
Holly Zausner, A Small Criminal Enterprise
Through August 3rd

Postmasters
459 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011

Thursday, July 12, 2012

The Checklist: 7/12/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: George Dureau: Higher Pictures: July 13: review
ONE STAR: Roger Mayne: Gitterman: July 21: review
ONE STAR: Spies in the House of Art: Met: August 26: review
TWO STARS: Heinrich Kuehn: Neue Galerie: August 27: review
ONE STAR: Naked before the Camera: Met: September 9: review

Midtown

THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Taryn Simon: MoMA: September 3: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Seung Woo Back: Doosan: July 14: review
ONE STAR: Katarzyna Majak: Porter Contemporary: July 14: review
ONE STAR: Milcho Manchevski: Miyako Yoshinaga: July 14: review
ONE STAR: Matthew Brandt: Yossi Milo: July 20: review
ONE STAR: Image Object: Foxy Production: July 20: review
THREE STARS: Richard Avedon: Gagosian: July 27: review
ONE STAR: Adi Nes: Jack Shainman: July 28: review
ONE STAR: Joni Sternbach: Rick Wester: August 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Peter Freeman: July 20: review
ONE STAR: Alfred Leslie: Janet Borden: July 27: review
ONE STAR: The Permanent Way: Apexart: July 28: review
ONE STAR: John Houck: KANSAS: August 4: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Rising Dragon: Katonah Museum of Art: September 2: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

No sales at this time.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The Permanent Way @Apexart

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung in the two room divided gallery space. The show combines work from 5 contemporary photographers with railroad maps, hand colored wood engravings, vintage photo postcards (from the collection of Luc Sante) and other ephemera. The exhibit was curated by Brian Sholis. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included, with information on the number of works on view and image details for reference:
  • Jeff Brouws: 3 archival pigment prints, each 37x44, from 2010 and 2011
  • Justine Kurland: 3 c-prints, each 15x30 or 40x50 (or reverse), from 2007, 2008 and 2012
  • Mark Ruwedel: 19 gelatin silver prints, each 8x10, from 1995-2005
  • Victoria Sambunaris: 2 chromogenic print, each 39x55, from 2007 and 2010
  • James Welling: 3 toned gelatin silver prints, each 18x22 (or reverse, from 1990 and 1991
Comments/Context: When we think about history in an academic, tell us the truth about the past sense, the one genre of photography that tends not to be considered particularly relevant is fine art photography. Without a second thought, we rely upon photojournalism and documentary photographs of various kinds to provide evidence for our backward looking interpretation of historical events, but we normally don't include photographs with art as a first purpose in this analysis. Perhaps we assume they are too subjective or slanted to be instructive. This collective bias is what makes The Permanent Way such an unexpected show - it's unabashedly a history lesson, and yet, the reasoned argument put forth is supported by fine art photographs as primary source material.

With the passage of the Pacific Railway Act 150 years ago this year, the US government unleashed what would become one of the most ambitious transformations of the American landscape ever undertaken. Land grants and rights of way enabled massive, industrial scale earthworks - bridge building, canyon cutting, rock blasting, path clearing, and track laying with a unprecedented scope. It was a fifty year whirlwind of engineered nation building, with commercial friendly rail lines spreading like blood vessels to every corner of the uninhabited West. Fast forward a century, and these railways are now permanently embedded in our landscapes, reshaping the way our towns and cities evolved, how our economy grew and developed, and how we see the land and its natural marvels. Along the way, the entire genre of American landscape photography was similarly remade.

Curator Brian Sholis has smartly mixed 19th century maps, photo post cards, and other vernacular material from the period with recent photographs made by five contemporary artists, each photographer employing a different approach to documenting the trains and railway infrastructure. None of these artists is a "train photographer" in the way that we might label O. Winston Link as such an artist; instead, the assembled group takes a broader view of the impact the trains have had (and continue to have) on the land and the communities that have grown up near the tracks. Victoria Sambunaris uses elevated views of bending arcs of freight cars and straight arrow tracks to tell complex, layered stories about the borderlands between the US and Mexico and the landscape of the Utah desert. Justine Kurland is perhaps more interested in the hobo subculture that has developed around the train system, and her images of the slow S curve of tracks that follow a river through the California mountain wilderness or the broad flat plains dominated by sky are quiet and lonely, measured by the contrast in scale between the rootless riders and the immensity of the land. Both Mark Ruwedel and Jeff Brouws examine the train system as a pattern of ruins; Ruwedel sees the formal Becher-style repetition in sharp V shaped cuts through rock and the dark holes of abandoned tunnels, while Brouws follows the empty railbeds as the thin paths vanish into the encroaching forest. And James Welling makes low angle black and white "portraits" of engines, evoking feelings that are alternately heroic and grimy.

Together, these photographs provide a varied, surprisingly unsentimental picture of the impact of the railroads on the American landscape. It's an effective proof that the downstream effects of the decisions made some 150 years ago still reverberate in increasingly complicated and nuanced ways, even when the trains have long since ceased to run in many cases. Most importantly, I think this show is a fabulous reminder that fine art photography can be a vital resource in helping to interpret the complexities of our collective past; we ought to thoughtfully mix history and art more often.
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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are not for sale. The contemporary photographers included in the exhibit are represented by the following New York galleries:
  • Jeff Brouws: Robert Mann Gallery (here)
  • Justine Kurland: Mitchell-Innes & Nash (here)
  • Mark Ruwedel: Yossi Milo Gallery (here)
  • Victoria Sambunaris: Yancey Richardson Gallery (here)
  • James Welling: David Zwirner (here)
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Reviews/Features: Modern Art Notes podcast (here), Artforum (here), Daily Beast (here)
  • Interview: Design Observer (here)
The Permanent Way
Through July 28th
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Apexart
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Adi Nes, The Village @Shainman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 large scale color photographs, framed in brown and unmatted, and hung in the entry area and the large back divided gallery. All of the works are chromogenic prints, made between 2008 and 2012. Each image is generally available in a small and large size; the small size is generally 39x49 (or reverse), in editions of 10, while the large size ranges from 55x70 to 69x88 (or reverse), in editions of 5. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Israeli photographer Adi Nes' newest images
are filled with a heightened sense of symbolic and allegorical tension. Taking a busy mix of allusions to Greek tragedy, stories from the Bible, and references to art history, and then filtering them through a contemporary kibbutz setting, he has created large scale staged photographic tableaux that teeter on the edge of formal melodrama.

Nearly all of Nes' photographs are built on anxious contrasts and simmering conflicts: closed versus open spaces, inside versus outside, old versus young. Villagers fire guns from the verdant green of the pasture into the nearby woods, keeping invisible invaders away. Young men argue with an old farmer (sons and a father?) over the fate of a sharply horned goat. A teenage boy is surrounded by naked young women in a dark, underground grotto dripping with cool water. And chickens and bats with outstretched wings hang at the mercy of boys itching for confrontation. Each scene is like a pregnant pause before the action begins. Even the images that mimic recognizable works from art history have this sense of impending struggle; there is something more stoically defiant about the shovel holding Grant Wood lookalike and and more lonely about the Picasso Boy Leading a Horse doppelganger than the originals they echo. And Nes' Greek tragedy references make the entire setting seem even more ominous; the serious choir singers belting out the words of the Greek chorus and the blind man telling his oracular news to the assembled crowd of men both reinforce a mood of enduring weariness.

All of these works feel carefully stage managed, the characters placed just so to maximize the thematic effect. It's photography as dramatic theater, executed with formulaic precision and charged with strong emotions. But in wandering through these galleries, I had the distinct sense of viewing "Israeli Art" and wondering whether I was missing certain references and metaphors that would be obvious, or at least more powerful, to insiders. Perhaps Nes is like an age old storyteller or traveling raconteur, weaving snippets of other epic tales and familiar myths into the fabric of his contemporary parables, hoping to expose his audience to the universal nature of events that have occurred far away.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The smaller 39x49 prints range in price from $20000 to $42000. The larger 55x70 prints range between $28000 and $50000, while the 69x88 prints range between $40000 and $70000. Nes' work has only been sporadically available in the secondary markets for photography in the past decade, with prices generally ranging between $6000 and $35000. But his works must have been more available in the contemporary art markets during that time, as I have seen sale results as high as $264000 mentioned in various articles. Companion shows to this one are running concurrently at Sommer Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv (here) and Galerie Praz-Delavallade in Paris (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Reviews/Features: Jerusalem Post (here), Haaretz (here)
  • Interview: Huffington Post (here)
Adi Nes, The Village
Through July 28th

Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011