Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 3 of 5

Part 1 of this five-part Frieze report can be found here. Start there for introductory background and explanatory notes.

Alfonso Artiaco (here): Darren Almond, $38000. A densely layered, fluttering mass of Tibetan prayer flags.

Mitchel-Innes & Nash (here): Catherine Opie, $50000. This work seems to point to more narrative in Opie's newest portraits. The sisters from Rodarte are her models, with sewn blood and a whisper coming out of the deep darkness.

Marc Foxx (here): Anne Collier, $28000. This front and back diptych of a postcard of a Turkana girl with a camera ("Say cheese before I click") is one of the strongest works I have seen in Collier's ongoing examination of found photographic ephemera. It's kitchy and head-shakingly dated, which is why it is so successful when seen through her rigorously conceptual eyes.

Yvon Lambert (here): Douglas Gordon, individually $2500 to $12000. A salon hanging jumble of textural still life images.

Dvir Gallery (here): Ariel Schlesingler, €10000. The external protective glass on this work is broken to echo the broken glass in the underlying photograph.

Laura Bartlett Gallery (here): Simon Dybbroe Møller, €11000. Five layers of still life electronics, wired together into one witty three dimensional pile.

Taro Nasu (here): Jonathan Monk, €2400. Araki's bondage nudes with the body parts removed, leaving drooping kimonos and empty ropes.

Galleria Raffaella Cortese (here): Barbara Bloom, $15000. Not only is this down-the-hallway photograph optically compelling, check out the wild, three color telescoped mat used to reinforce the color progression.

Jack Hanley Gallery (here): Torbjorn Rødland, $4000. Quirky microphone antics in the scrubby forest.

Goodman Gallery (here): Candice Breitz, $5500 each. In these stills, the artist has inserted herself into a South African soap opera, an oddly out of place white presence among black actors. There is a sense of deliberate randomness here, of being unrelated to the story going on around her, that makes the contrived situations all the more unsettled.

Continue to Part 4 here.

New Photography 2012 @MoMA

JTF (just the facts): A group show of the work of six contemporary photographers (4 individuals and 1 partnership), variously framed and matted, and hung in a divided two room gallery on the 3rd floor. The exhibit was curated by Eva Respini. (Installation shots at right.)

 

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

• Michele Abeles: (9 pigmented inkjet prints, framed in white and unmatted, from 2009-2012)
• Birdhead (Ji Weiyu and Song Tao): (1 group of 71 gelatin silver prints, tacked directly to the wall in a grid, overlaid with 8 additional photographs set in mahogany frames, from 2012)
• Anne Collier: (4 chromogenic color prints, framed in white and unmatted, from 2009-2012)
• Zoe Crosher: (1 group of 11 chromogenic color prints (including 1 set of 15 images mounted together), mostly framed in white with no mat (two are mounted and unframed), from 2012)
• Shirana Shahbazi: (4 chromogenic prints, 3 gelatin silver prints, and 1 wallpaper lithograph with applied pigment, framed in white/black and unmatted, from 2011-2012)

Comments/Context: This year's annual roundup of new photography at the MoMA follows in the footsteps of its predecessor and opts for inclusive diversity as its overriding theme. Given the explosion of image making triggered by the digital revolution and coupled with the loosening definitions and boundaries of the medium, this would seem like a safe and prudent choice. But with today's backdrop of tumultuous innovation and risk-taking experimentation, I have to say I was surprised at how dull and expected this show is. It covers bases and samples styles (especially those with a conceptual bent), but ultimately fails to get out to the edges and bring back something fresh and brilliant.

 

In my view, the overwhelming standout in this show is Michele Abeles. What's exciting about her work is that it both collapses several discrete genres (nude, still life, studio staging) and throws the results into the digital mixer, flattening out the space and cutting it into misaligned strips and layers. Odd juxtapositions of male bodies, plywood, printed fabrics, potted plants, wine bottles, engineering drawings, and colored filters lead to puzzlingly complex groupings, which are then further upended by digital stitching and rework, creating woven plaids and jittering lines of image fragments. I like the clash of ideas in these pictures, as well as the smart integration of digital wizardry; the photographs feel like the beginnings of something truly original and invigorating.

 

The other four bodies of work are all accomplished, of course, but don't really offer wildly compelling or particularly new paths forward. Anne Collier sharply recontextualizes printed ephemera (album covers, magazine ads, a MoMA event calendar with a Weston nude), forcing the viewer to reconsider embedded stereotypes and biases. Zoe Crosher immerses herself in the appropriated archive of a 1970s woman, rephotographing and altering her subject's Mae West poses and fantasy lives in a Cindy Sherman-esque study of identity. Birdhead furiously snaps offhand black and white images of the vitality of everyday Shanghai, finding the energy of self-centered youth in a city of bridges, TV towers, and palm trees. And Shirana Shahbazi pairs commercial-style abstractions in bold color with the parallel visual motifs of a jagged mountain or a diver in flight.

 

So while this show certainly covers many of the key themes in today's photographic dialogue (it's all appropriately "on trend"), the overall feeling of the exhibit is more like a checklist of the topics we're supposed to be discussing rather than a discovery or championing of groundbreaking ideas. As we might expect, there's China, and appropriation, and archives, and digital manipulation, and image proliferation, and commercial approaches, and crossing medium boundaries, but aside from the impressive chaos of Michele Abeles, much of the output is less than memorable.

 

Collector's POV: Given this is a museum show, there are of course no posted prices. The photographers in the exhibit are represented by the following galleries:

• Michele Abeles: 47 Canal (here)
• Birdhead: ShanghART Gallery (here)
• Anne Collier: Anton Kern Gallery (here)
• Zoe Crosher: Perry Rubenstein (here)
• Shirana Shahbazi: Galerie Bob Van Orsouw (here)

None of these artists has any meaningful history in the secondary markets, so gallery retail will likely be the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Exhibition site (here)
• Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here), Time LightBox (here), New Yorker PhotoBooth (here), Capital New York (here)
• Michele Abeles artist site (here)
• Zoe Crosher artist site (here)

New Photography 2012

Through February 4th 

 

Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53rd Street

New York, NY 10019

Anne Collier @Kern

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 photographs, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller back room. All of the works are c-prints, made in 2011 or 2012. In the main gallery, physical dimensions range from roughly 47x61 to 51x72; in the back room, all of the prints are 29x24 (or reverse), with one exception at 49x40. No edition size information was provided on the checklist. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Anne Collier's fascination with the conceptual underpinnings of photographic ephemera continues to be a rich vein for artistic exploration. Her recent work furthers her accumulation of paper-based cast-offs and found objects related to photography (record covers, books, calendars, magazines, postcards, and other items of less obvious categorization), which are then given antiseptic still life treatment in pure white surroundings. Her approach focuses our attention on these artifacts, and the cultural tendencies they indirectly represent.

While there are plenty of decontextualized nudes on view in the main room here, the most striking are those that were originally from camera ads. Product shots of cameras and text blurbs float in front of a casually posed black and white nude, artfully placed to partially conceal (or highlight) areas of attention. In another, entitled Caravaggio by Nikon, a nude woman emerges from a darkened background, covered by something approximating a hand towel. When placed in this pristine contemporary setting, their datedness is both absurd and revealing.

The postcard still lifes in the back room work their target viewers in a different way. Instead of using shapely nudes to attract men, cameras and light meters are placed amidst other accoutrements of high living: scotch, cigars, driving gloves, sunglasses, maps (and a globe), flowers, ties, and photo albums. These works almost look like Outerbridge still lifes, with their bold nostalgic colors. Their message that a camera is a must-have accessory for the well turned out man is clear. And once again, their outmoded details make them quirky evidence of changing attitudes.

Collier's detached, commercial photography approach to documenting these items adds a layer of increased scrutiny, beyond what an exhibit of the original materials would have provided. Her isolation makes the objects and their inherent worldviews more visible, sharpening our ability to see them for what they are and to consider how much has changed (or not) in the intervening years.
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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The larger prints in the  room are $18000 each. The smaller prints in the back room are $11000 each, with the larger image in the back at $16000. Collier's work has only just begun to find its way into the secondary markets, but there have been too few sales to chart any kind of reliable price history. As such, gallery retail is still likely the best option for interested collectors.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Reviews/Features: Interview (here), Frieze (here)

Anne Collier
Through May 12th

Anton Kern Gallery
532 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011

High Line Billboard: Anne Collier

JTF (just the facts): A single billboard, 25x75 feet, displayed at the corner of 18th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea. The work is entitled Developing Tray #2 and is print on vinyl, from 2009.
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Comments/Context: The High Line Billboard series is turning out to be much more intriguing than I might have thought at the outset. The parameters of the billboard make for unexpected experimentation with monumental scale, and its location allows for contextual relationships that are wholly different from a gallery setting.

In this second iteration of the series, one of Anne Collier's recent developing tray images is blown up and left drifting in an expanse of wide, thick blackness. On the white walls of a gallery and at normal scale, this image (it's the artist's eye) would be much more intimate and personal, and the whole process centric theme of the emerging image floating in the tray would be more at the forefront of engaging with the work. But on this massive scale, and in the context of the bustling city around it, the work is transformed into a penetrating, disconcerting, Orwellian gaze. It's as though she's peering through the knothole of the tray out into our diorama world.
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Collector's POV: This commissioned work was not overtly for sale, nor are there many comparables in terms of scale in recent auction history. Collier is represented in New York by Anton Kern Gallery (here).
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Review: Societe Perrier (here)

Anne Collier
Through February 29th

High Line
Billboard at 18th Street and 10th Avenue