LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital @Brooklyn Museum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 33 black and white photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in a single long gallery space on the second floor of the museum. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, made between 2002 and 2011; no physical dimensions or edition information were provided. The show also includes 3 sets of 3 raster etched aluminum plates, made in 2010, and two end walls covered in custom wallpaper, made in 2013. This is Frazier's first solo show in New York. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While LaToya Ruby Frazier's photographs have found their way into a number of important group shows and biennials in recent years, this show finally offers an opportunity to see a larger selection of her recent work in one place. Frazier's penetrating black and white images of her family and the surrounding community of Braddock, PA, feel at first glance like a throwback to a style of concerned social documentary from decades earlier. But this is really only the first layer of a complex multi-pronged exploration, with interior still lifes, portraits of her mother and aging grandparents, and unflinching self-portraits added to the mix, making her investigations much closer than arm's length, more intimate and personal. With a further element of archival research and the related study of collective and individual memory, her photographs come together in a satisfyingly interleaved whole, touching on repeated themes from a variety of angles.

Frazier's images in and around Braddock capture a depressing sense of decay and inattention. Overgrown greenery covers boarded up buildings and chokes the remaining trees, smoky factories sit idle, and the local hospital is demolished into a pile of rubble. The once prosperous steel industry of Andrew Carnegie is a faint memory, leaving behind the ghostly shell of its prior glory, along with plenty of toxic leftovers, environmental damage, and jobless workers. The fact that a tavern is left standing like a stage set amid the crushed cement of the old hospital is a quiet testament to the trade-offs this community has been forced to make.

But Frazier isn't content to document the struggles of this place from afar; the best of her pictures track her own extended family as it is pushed and pulled by disease, poverty, and a lack of options. Abstract problems are given real human faces, as Grandma Ruby cares for her ailing husband, travels to the hospital, arranges her collection of dolls, and ultimately becomes painfully frail herself. The wearying force of the entire situation comes through poignantly as Grandma Ruby dies, her formal wake and her now empty recliner equally dispiriting. Frazier's images of her mother tell a different tale of trapped endurance, one of cramped apartments, dead end jobs, boyfriends, surgeries, and Red Cross blankets; there is little joy in her face, but plenty of determined, supportive resolve. When seen together, the three generations of women remind us of the scale and duration of these fraying communal issues, of intractable problems passed down through the years and strong women trying hard to find ways to make the best of it.

While Frazier's portrait of her family and hometown is certainly disheartening, there is never of feeling of giving up. These are hard hitting, honest pictures, but they leave you with a sense of quiet tenacity, where outrage is joined with practical making do. The issues she depicts are entirely specific but broadly universal, showing just how closely the complex well being of local citizens is tied to the often overlooked historical and intergenerational roots of the community in which they live.

 

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, the works on view have no posted prices. Frazier doesn't seem to have any New York gallery representation at the moment; Galerie Michel Rein in Paris (here) appears to be her only outlet at this time. With little or no secondary market history for her work, gallery retail will be the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Features/Reviews: New York Times (here), New Yorker (here)
• Interview: Art in America (here)

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital

Through August 11th

 

Brooklyn Museum

200 Eastern Parkway

Brooklyn, NY 11238

Lorna Simpson: Gathered @Brooklyn Museum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 2 large installations and 1 video, hung along two long walls in a single room gallery space and in an adjacent darkened viewing area. One installation (57/09) consists of 308 small, square format gelatin silver prints, framed in white and matted, and hung in an undulating grid pattern. The second installation consists of 82 vintage photo booth prints and 68 small ink drawings, both framed in bronze, along with 30 solid bronze rectangles and 15 thinner bronze plates, arranged in a loose cluster. The video, Easy to Remember, consists of a grid of 15 mouths in black and white; it runs 2 minutes and 35 seconds. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The three works in Lorna Simpson's new show at the Brooklyn Museum all turn on the idea of cultural memory, of how past and present are often collapsed together and how our history is fully intertwined with our contemporary lives. It's a powerful, sometimes haunting display that explores the universal nature of the passing of time, via its specific embodiment in the African-American experience.

In the first piece, Simpson has juxtaposed hundreds of 1950s amateur pinup photographs (found at flea markets and on eBay) with recent black and white self-portraits, recreating the specific poses, hairstyles and clothing with exacting mimicry. Both women talk on the phone, sit on benches, stand in the kitchen or near a TV, or sprawl invitingly on the floor. The mixing of old and new images and the constant repetition of twinned poses creates a strong back and forth rhythm. At first, I picked out the subtle differences between Simpson's self-portraits (with an obvious edge of conceptual irony) and the genuine vintage photos; what is surprising is that after 50 or 60 images all tightly strung together, the context starts to dissolve away, and after another 100 or so, the contrasts become even more subtle, and they all merge together into an open-ended hybrid of past and present, reality and illusion. More than 50 years separates the lives of these two women, and yet, the connections are there; it's like Simpson has created a kind of mirror that accounts for the changes in cultural context and perspective over time, but highlights the underlying commonality which remains.

The second piece brings together faded and wrinkled photo booth portraits, washes of dark ink, and rectangles of bronze into a complex meditation on the nature of memory. Anonymous faces stare out from the photographs, offering tantalizing clues to lost personal stories (who were these people and what happened to them?). As time passes, these individuals alternately fade and darken, becoming abstract blots of dark ink, eventually transforming themselves into mute blocks of cool bronze. Taken together, the installation seems to document the subtle process of forgetting, where the lives and accomplishments of those who came before us slowly disappear; as more and more specific faces become unknown blocks, it becomes harder and harder to recreate our collective history.

The video installation comes at the idea of memory from a different direction. 15 mouths hum the tune to the 1935 Rogers and Hart classic It's Easy to Remember. The catchy melody will be instantly familiar to most, but the humming removes the actual lyrics, leaving behind a ghost of the song itself. Once again, Simpson has given us a fragmented shard of history, and then opened it up for a broad array of possible interpretations. I left the museum with the tune still stuck in my head, almost like a spooky undefined anthem.

Taken together, this is a thoughtful, understated, and quietly brilliant show about complex, interrelated cultural ideas and how time alters our perspective on these forces. And as a mark of something durably original, it has kept me thinking long after my trip to the museum.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, the works on view are obviously not for sale. Simpson's photographs have only been intermittently available in the secondary markets in recent years, with prices ranging between roughly $1000 and $25000. As such, gallery retail is likely a better option for interested collectors at this point. The artist is represented by Salon 94 in New York (here).
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Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: La Lettre de la Photographie (here), Snapshots (here), New Yorker (here), Brooklyn Paper (here) 

Lorna Simpson: Gathered
Through August 21st

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Sam Taylor-Wood: Ghosts @Brooklyn Museum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 large scale color photographs, framed in brown wood and not matted, and hung along a single interior wall. All of the works are chromogenic prints, made in 2008. Each print is 43x56. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Ask me to name a famous picture of the Yorkshire Moors and my first reaction would be Bill Brandt's black and white image of Top Withens from 1945 (here). British contemporary photographer Sam Taylor-Wood recently made her own series of images of this iconic landscape, recreating once again the gothic drama of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

The land itself is rugged and windswept, with tawny grasses covering the hillsides and rocky humps. Scraggly trees stand in isolation against stormy grey skies, and lonely footpaths wind their way across the empty expanse. Taylor-Wood's landscapes heighten the melodrama of this bleak land, bringing a cinematic romance to otherwise desolate views. Her palette is drained, full of dark shadows, interrupted from time to time by a fleeting moment of sunshine which warms the golden stubble. I found these photographs to have a strong sense of theatrical stagecraft, of the artist intentionally enhancing the emotive power of the environment to create something expressive. Just like in the famous book, the land has a distinct personality of its own that influences the course of the narrative, and Taylor-Wood has made photographs that capture and intensify those particular gothic Victorian character traits, without exaggerating them into caricatures.

What I found most surprising here is that Taylor-Wood has made landscape photographs infused with film still romance and grand gestures, an approach that seems to react profoundly against a more prevalent contemporary trend toward deadpan sharpness and smaller found detail. In a way, these pictures feel classicly, overflowingly retro, which makes them quite a bit more memorable than you might otherwise expect.
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Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, the prints on view are obviously not for sale. Taylor-Wood's photographs have been intermittently available in the secondary markets in recent years, with prices ranging between roughly $5000 and $140000. The artist is represented by White Cube in London (here).

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

Transit Hub:

• Features: Independent (here), ArtObserved (here)

Sam Taylor-Wood: Ghosts

Through August 14th

Brooklyn Museum

200 Eastern Parkway

Brooklyn, NY 11238