Every Booth at the 2013 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 6 of 6

Start here for Part 1 of this series. It provides some background and explanation for what's going on in these lists.

Andrea Meislin Gallery (here): Angela Strassheim, $12000. Strassheim has recently joined the stable at the gallery. This image of a young girl cocooned in her interior lit blanket fort is wonderfully protected and vulnerable.

Vision Neil Folberg Gallery (here): Georg Kuettinger, $11000. A massive broad landscape of stitched together tire swipes.

Richard Moore Photographs (here): Johan Hagemeyer, $12000. Another lesser known but worthy Modernist, represented by a well crafted image of city buildings.

Keith De Lellis Gallery (here): Margaret Bourke-White, $18000. I think of 1930 as near the beginning of Bourke-White's professional career, so it was exciting to see this early shimmering airplane hangar study from that year.

Joel Soroka Gallery (here): Gyorgy Kepes, $8000. I had no idea Gyorgy Kepes made any works past the late 1940s, so it is was a total shock to see a group of large scale 1980s Polaroid still life constructions (in color no less) in this booth.

Halsted Gallery (here): Julia Margaret Cameron, $11500. Another ethereal Cameron portrait, very reasonably priced given its quality (refreshingly the norm with the friendly Halsteds).

PPOW (here): David Wojnarowicz, $25000. Vintage prints from Wojnarowicz' Arthur Rimbaud in New York series are pretty rare, so this gem is worth seeking out.

Higher Pictures (here): K8 Hardy, $8000. This booth was a solo show of Hardy's Position series, mixing photograms and self-portraits into arresting hybrids. I was able to flip through the full body of work (in a box on the table) and I came away extremely impressed by Hardy's originality and range. This particular image reminded me of Claude Cahun, but in a harsher and distinctly modern guise.

Stephen Daiter Gallery (here): Harry Callahan, $60000. This image just left me shaking my head in awe. What an astounding, astonishing photograph. Stunning is an overused word in art writing, but this one left me slack-jawed and truly stunned by its brilliance.

Nailya Alexander Gallery (here): Pentti Sammallahti, $1100. I liked the gentle, natural balance in this image, the cross of the broken tree limb and the flanking silhouettes of small birds.

Danziger Gallery (here): Susan Derges, $15000. I've always been a fan of Susan Derges' River Taw photograms, so I'm intrigued to see her returning to similar subject matter, albeit now using digital technologies.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery (here): Jaromir Funke, $175000. This was one of the most impressive prints I saw in the entire fair. Cut paper folds intertwined like staircases, a symphony in subtle white.

Hans P. Kraus Jr. Inc. (here): William Henry Fox Talbot, POR. What better way to end this summary than by going back to the beginning with a lovely plant photogram by William Henry Fox Talbot. Even when we bustle and rush to find the next new thing in photography, it's important to be reminded that the very old still has the power to take our breath away.

Angela Strassheim, Evidence @Marvelli

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 black and white works, framed in black with no mat, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller second room. All of prints are archival pigment prints, made in 2009. The works come in one of three sizes: 28x35, 46x58 or 58x73; all are printed in editions of 8. There are 3 works in the smallest size, 7 in the middle size, and 1 in the largest size in this show. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Angela Strassheim's images of the hidden remnants of long ago crime scenes add a haunting sense of memory to otherwise ordinary interiors. Her crime scenes have none of the fresh gore of a flash lit Weegee photo or the puzzling conceptual randomness of Mandel and Sultan's landmark project. Instead they uncover the violent past lurking within the everyday, invisible to the naked eye, but very much still present.

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Strassheim uses a forensic chemical technique to highlight old blood stains that have been cleaned away, seen as a white powdery luminescence against the darkened rooms, vaguely similar to the effect in black light photographs. Her works depict kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms covered in glowing splotches, sprays, drips, and mists of blood, some bearing the marks of hands and fingers. The remains of these crimes are everywhere: on the back of a door, covering a dresser, sloshed over a wall molding, and in the corner of a tiled floor. Perhaps the creepiest of these images is of a living room, where two family portraits have been hung unknowingly on top of an entire wall of bloody smears.
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While these images have a dramatic, almost cinematic feel, I think they successfully get beyond the detective science gimmick to the more interesting questions of history embedded in a place. New tenants are now living right on top of the remains of any number of violent crimes, likely totally unaware of the horrors that lie beneath the surface. The walls have not forgotten however, and still bear the marks of those past events, for those who take the time to look. Strassheim's shadowy rooms filled with phosphorescence bring these untold stories to the surface, creating ironic juxtapositions and unsettling contrasts; in one image, a brightly lit TV, streaming light from the long exposure, sits directly adjacent to yet another bloody stain. Life has gone on, but there are ghosts of the past everywhere, hiding in plain view.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $11000, $15000 or $18000 based on size. Strassheim's work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: Vulture, 2009 (here), Artnet, 2006 (here)
• Exhibition: Monterey Museum of Art, 2008 (here)
• Whitney Biennial, 2006 (here)

Angela Strassheim, Evidence

Through December 31st

Marvelli Gallery

526 West 26th Street

New York, NY 10001