Peter Piller, Umschläge @Kreps

JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 color and 12 black and white photographs, variously framed/unframed, and hung in the divided gallery space. The color works are archival pigment prints mounted on alu-dibond, framed in white and unmatted, and made in 2011/2012. Each print is sized 25x33 and is available in an edition of 6. (The color works look like diptychs, but they are printed as single images.) The black and white works consist of 2 sets of 6 archival pigment prints, unframed and pinned directly to the wall, and made in 2011. The individual prints are also sized 25x33, and the sets are available in editions of 6. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: In recent years, the mining of archival visual material has grown into its own subgenre of contemporary photography. Drawing on the appropriation and recontextualization techniques of the Pictures Generation artists, newer names are unearthing photographs from any number of eclectic and forgotten sources and repurposing them in ever evolving forms of expression. The advent of high quality digital scanning seems to have catalyzed a flowering of experimentation and reinterpretation.

Peter Piller has been working with found images for more than 20 years at this point, and this show brings together two new bodies of work that play with unlikely juxtaposition. The first project pairs the front and back covers of an East German military magazine, each work a kitchy diptych of weaponry and a pin-up girl, with the original text covered by brightly colored geometric shapes. Modest, good looking young women pose in skirts and bikinis, exuding a subtle kind of chaste glamour, flanked by fighter jets, missile launchers, and amphibious trucks. The combinations are surprisingly varied, covering a wide range of military machinery and tactics: frogmen, winter skiing, rock climbers, rifle sharpshooters, water bridges, rubber rafts, and parachutes, each joined with an enticing 1970s era beauty. The works are like caricatures of male desire/interest, made all the more ridiculous by their original reality. They feel like a more restrained form of Robert Heinecken's magazine interventions, or a conceptual sibling of Anne Collier's recent work.

The second project puts together black and white post card images of destroyed World War I battlefields with cropped images of crashing waves taken from a 1920s geography textbook. Both have a sense of implicit violence, of power and force either poised for action or already unleashed. To my eye, the scarred landscapes somehow make the waves look more menacing, while at the same time, their grandeur makes the flattened, pockmarked wastelands look like the height of human folly. Piller has deftly matched these two groups of images, finding just the right balance without letting one dominate the other; the result is a satisfying back and forth rhythm.

At least in these two bodies of work, Piller's brand of archive mining seems rooted in a particular national history rather than a more universal, postmodern global reality. Part of what makes his pairings interesting is their German backstory, their context as much a part of what the images represent as the pictures themselves. Reconsidering that underlying identity or inherent point of view gives the works some edge, making his visual juxtapositions that much richer and more complex.

 

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The individual color prints are priced at €3500 each, while the sets of 6 black and white prints are priced at €15000 each. Piller's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail remains the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), Gallerist NY (here), Daily Beast (here)

 

Peter Piller, Umschläge

Through May 18th

 

Andrew Kreps Gallery

525 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

Roe Ethridge, Le Luxe @Kreps

JTF (just the facts): A total of 12 large scale color works and 2 sets of bookshelves, framed in white and not matted, and hung in the entry, the main gallery space, and the office area. All of the works are c-prints, ranging in size from roughly 37x25 to 77x52. The photographs were made between 2005 and 2011, and have been printed in editions of 5. The bookshelves are alternately made of stainless steel (1 unit) and pine wood (9 units), from 2011. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Mack Books (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: It has taken me quite a while to get my head around just what exactly Roe Ethridge is doing in his photography. The first couple of times I saw his work, all I could discover was a sense of impersonal randomness, often executed in a glossy commercial style, mixing appropriated and original work with equal facility. Without any apparent connection or narrative to link the works, I simply couldn't find my way in, and was left mystified by the ordinariness of it all.

This show of new work was my first experience in seeing a larger group of images actually sequenced by Ethridge, rather than simply catching a glimpse of a picture or two taken out of context. What I found was that I started to understand how this approach operates, especially in the open-endedness of what the pictures taken together might (or might not) imply. It sounds corny I'm sure, but it's almost as if the space between the pictures is what Ethridge is after, rather than the specific images themselves.

What's actually on the walls is a puzzling group of seemingly unrelated subjects and styles: a group of images from a commission by Goldman Sachs to document the building of its new offices (still lifes of wet sand pits and mottled concrete floors, workers installing glass curtain walls), a plastic shopping bag against a glossy red brick wall, a shiny over-pixelated bow, an appropriated Point Break poster with the artist's face superimposed over Patrick Swayze, two aerial views of Tokyo with rainbow lights and glittering gold haze, a grid of women in bikinis, etc. In seeing these all together, I began to see a strong relationship to the work of Wolfgang Tillmans. The similarities between the two are structural I think, not stylistic; Ethridge has substituted an impersonal often commercial view for Tillmans' deadpan observations of small moments, but the effect is the same - it's how the pieces are put together and recontextualized that generates the insights. This idea of the pictures as a scaffolding for the narratives that fall between them is reinforced by the empty bookshelves installed in the gallery. Whether wood or steel, all they do is provide structure; the information is missing, to be supplied by the viewer.

As stand alone images, I continue to have trouble with many of Ethridge's slicker efforts, as I don't think they hold up particularly well on their own. But as an environment (or perhaps as a book I imagine), I finally saw the core of his originality. The ideas are a bit obtuse and reach beyond what we normally think of as the normal boundaries of "self-contained" photography, but as digital images exponentially proliferate, perhaps Ethridge's approach to mash-up and shuffled rework of any and all may signal a new way of thinking about conceptual relationships within photography.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $12000 and $28000 (with intermediate prices at $14000, $18000, and $24000), roughly based on size. Ethridge's work is not consistently available in the secondary markets; prices for the few lots that have sold at auction in recent years have ranged between $12000 and $20000. As such, gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: New Yorker (here), TimeOut New York (here)

Roe Ethridge, Le Luxe
Through July 2nd

Andrew Kreps Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011