Bill Armstrong, Film Noir @Clamp Art

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 large scale color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in single room gallery space. All of the works are c-prints, made in 2011 and 2012. The images come in three sizes: 20x24 or reverse (in editions of 10), 30x36 or reverse (in editions of 5) and 40x48 or reverse (in editions of 3). There are 9 prints in the small size, 6 prints in the medium size, and 1 print in the large size on display. (Installation shots at right.).

Comments/Context: In a contemporary photography world dominated by sharpness, Bill Armstrong is a contrarian. Since the late 1990s, he has been making pictures defined by their extreme blurriness, letting his appropriated and collaged compositions dissolve into exercises in visual perception. His newest project begins with the shadowy visual motifs of film noir and turns them into indistinct silhouettes swimming in seas of vibrant, lavish, saturated color. The effect is a sense of heightened moodiness and mystery, well matched to the hard boiled Chandleresque subject matter of men in dark coats.

Armstrong's blurred approach deftly strips away any specific narrative or distracting details, paring the compositions back to amorphous forms and painterly swaths of color. The most recognizable scenes find lonely men posed against rich yellow and orange sunsets, or hunkered down in drab hues against the encroaching trees or falling rain. Others have an almost futuristic feel, with dark figures faced with long, receding hallways. And many defy any kind of imposed story at all, breaking down into ethereal component parts and bold abstractions of electric yellow, bright purple, royal blue, and fire engine red.

Armstrong clearly has a well developed sense for color, both in harmony and in dissonance. What I find interesting here is that his unconventional methods take him down a different but adjacent road to the photographic color studies we're generally accustomed to. In his hands, the camera no longer has any connection to normal documentation - its role is more of a distorting filter that upends our ability to discern and categorize. His color experiments are wholly constructed, but still have a whisper of faint recognizability, leaving the viewer in a shimmering, undefined middle ground.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows: the 20x24 prints are $2200, the 30x36 prints are $4500, and the 40x48 prints are $8000. Armstrong's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Review: Daily Serving (here)

Bill Armstrong, Film Noir

Through April 6th

Clamp Art
521-531 West 25th Street
Ground Floor
New York, NY 10001

Gregory Halpern, A @Clamp Art

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in single room gallery space. The chromogenic prints come in two sizes: 10x8 (editions of 7) and 18x14 (editions of 5), with a few images also available in a 40x30 size (editions of 3). There are 8 images in the small size, 14 in the medium size, and 2 in the large size on display in the exhibit. The works were made between 2005 and 2011. A monograph of this body of work was published in 2011 by J&L Books (here). (Installation shots at right.).
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Comments/Context: In Gregory Halpern's photographic portrait of Rust Belt America, a sparkling piece of jewelry offered by a black gloved hand seems like an impossible treasure, a talisman of uncanny brilliance somehow blindingly inappropriate or just completely out of context in this dingy, downtrodden world. It refers to a better time, a time of luxury and wealth and optimism, but in these pictures, that time is long gone.
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What Halpern has documented in these cities (Baltimore, Cincinnati, Omaha, and Detroit) is the beginning of the end, where wildness is creeping back into the realms of civilization. Faces are quietly defiant or meekly averted, wearing a mix of haggard, bloodied, and exhausted glances. Houses smoulder with lingering fire, or crumble from decay and rot regardless of makeshift supports. Trees take on an almost sinister quality, triumphing over human pruning to win in the end. And feral cats and aggressive raccoons prowl the streets with an unabashed lack of fear; a peacock runs loose and blackbirds smother a tree in the eerie twilight. In these pictures, Halpern takes the broad economic challenges of these regions and turns them into smaller life and death struggles, a resilient battle between relentlessly persevering and giving in to the invading desolation. The inhabitants are reduced to scavengers, scratching out an existence against the raw tide of ruin.
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Halpern's photographs have a harsh lyricism that may make them hard for some collectors to warm up to. But they are soberly successful (especially in book form) in capturing the sense of helpless, slowly encroaching chaos that has overtaken some of our once great cities. In these worlds, when seen from the perspective of a lowly mouse, even a hissing kitty can seem ferociously predatory.
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Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows: the 10x8 prints are $1200, the 18x14 prints are $2000, and the 40x30 prints are $3500. Halpern's work has little or no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Review: New Yorker (here)
• Book Reviews: Photo-Eye (here), LPV (here)

Gregory Halpern, A

Through February 11th
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Clamp Art

521-531 West 25th Street

Ground Floor

New York, NY 10001

Jill Greenberg, Glass Ceiling @ClampArt

Another closed show from earlier in the summer.
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JTF (just the facts): A total of 12 color photographs, framed in white with no mats, and hung in single room gallery space. The archival pigment prints come in three sizes: 14x19 (editions of 10), 25x33 (editions of 7), and 41x56 (editions of 3); there is 1 image in the small size, 10 in the medium size, and 1 in the large size on display in the exhibit. The works were made between 2008 and 2011. There is also a single sculpture on a white pedestal (a glass slipper), sized roughly 9x8x4, from 2011. (Installation shots at right.).

Comments/Context: Jill Greenberg's recent underwater photographs are a meaningful departure from her signature stylized portraits of crying children, bears, and celebrities. Starting with ideas drawn from a commercial assignment (capturing the US synchronized swimming team), the project evolved over time into an overtly feminist statement, connecting to work from earlier in her artistic career.

Greenberg's setup leads to a fairly literal visual embodiment of the concept of the "glass ceiling". Women in color coordinated bathing suits hang suspended in pastel colored swimming pools; lit from above and shot from below, the bodies (either as clusters of women or solitary figures) drift headless, as their tops poke through the surface of the water. The strikingly preposterous detail to be found in these images is that all the women are wearing high heeled shoes, which weigh them down like anchors, dragging them into objectified doll-like poses or making them bob up and down in the water like buoys or corpses. Immersed in playful combinations of cotton candy pink, aquamarine blue, and faded peach refractions, the bodies seem oddly passive; unable to swim, the only option is to struggle to the top and gasp for breath. The prettiness of the pictures makes the situation all the more awkward and ridiculous.

While the feminist irony of the construct is obvious in a heavy handed way, I found the images to be quietly matter of fact and surprisingly distant. Sure, we can make some easy joke about being "dragged down by style" or the like, but there was less thrashing, fighting, and tension against that invisible barrier than I might have expected. The figures seem to float powerlessly, drained of their energy and empty of purpose, simply making the best of the puzzling reality of being stuck swimming in fancy shoes.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced by size: "small" at $3500, "medium" at $5500, and "large" at $8000. Only a couple of Greenberg's prints have reached the secondary markets, so it's hard to chart much of a price pattern from so few lots; as such, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

Two random asides. First, these images reminded me of a terrific poem by the British poet Stevie Smith called Not Waving But Drowning (here). Second, I have racked my brain for durably memorable underwater photographs and I have come up empty. In fact, the only ones that I could remember at all were Brett Weston's underwater nudes, which I have never cared for even remotely. What have I forgotten?

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)

Jill Greenberg, Glass Ceiling
Through August 19th

Clamp Art

521-531 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Michael Schmelling: Atlanta - Hip Hop and the South @Clamp Art

JTF (just the facts): A total of 35 color and black and white photographs, variously framed with no mats (one image is unframed and pinned directly to the wall), and hung in single room gallery space, with a small checkerboard motif in one corner of the floor. The digital c-prints range in size between 11x14 and 20x30, with several of intermediate sizes; many are 15x10 or reverse. The works were made between 2007 and 2010, and are available in editions of 5, regardless of size. There are also 2 unique works made from photographic cut outs mounted to paper; these smaller images are 12x9. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Chronicle Books (here). (Installation shots at right.).

Comments/Context: If we play a word association game and I give you "Southern photography", I'm guessing that most of you would come back with some combination of Eggleston, Christenberry, and Mann. Michael Schmelling's images of modern Atlanta depict an entirely different South than that of those three photographic masters, a place of raw urban grit and youth-driven hip hop culture. His snapshot aesthetic is a perfect match for the rowdy, brash energy of the place, where scantily clad young women primp themselves in dingy colored rooms and shirtless young men with low-slung beltless pants (prison style) strut and swagger.
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Schmelling clearly has an eye for saturated color; his pictures pop off the wall with muscular intensity: the bright yellow mustard of a chili dog, the purple wall of a bathroom, the orange leggings of a club girl, the head-to-toe lime green outfit of a rapper. He also captures the smaller details of the lifestyle with close attention: a curled sheet of scratched lyrics, the jumble of microphones and abandoned speakers found in makeshift recording studios, close up hand gestures (pointing and posing), and the bright club lights that create harsh shadows. Most importantly, he's successfully recreated the rough mood of the environment, his pictures peppered with moments of saucy indecency and masculine preening.

My first impression of this show was that it was loose and off-hand, probably due to the way the images are mixed on the main wall. But a closer look revealed that the photographs are anything but accidental; I liked the editing and sequencing, especially the interleaving of portraits and atmospheric still lifes to round out the larger narrative. On the surface, the work is lively and fresh, a breath of something different from the normal Chelsea fare; down a layer or two, it's simply well-constructed, accomplished photography.
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Collector's POV: The works in this show are reasonably priced, falling between $1200 and $1800 based on size. Schmelling's work has not yet appeared in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

While I liked quite a few images in this show, my favorite was Fusion_7, 2009; it's second from the right in the bottom installation shot. Three sassy girls in tank tops and short shorts vamp with their tongues out, giving the camera the finger. It has the same kind of joyous spirit found in Malick Sidibé's images of 1960s Bamako clubs, with an added veneer of 21st century attitude.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here) and Atlanta Revisited blog (here)
• Review: New Yorker (here)

Michael Schmelling: Atlanta - Hip Hop and the South

Through March 19th

Clamp Art
521-531 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

A Sincere Plug for our 2010 Sponsors

I'd like to end this year with a sincere plug for the 2010 sponsors of DLK COLLECTION. Given that the vast majority of our readers subscribe to the feed (rather than arriving directly to the site), many of you may not even realize that we have sponsors. In fact we do, and their banners fly proudly along the sidebar.

As a friendly reminder, although we don't have non-profit status, being a photography critic/blogger is undeniably a money losing proposition. It's also a massive time sink, and if it wasn't such an amazingly gratifying and challenging labor of love, a rational person would give it up right away.

Our sponsors provide something extremely valuable that our mostly silent readers, followers, and intermittent anonymous visitors don't: they provide a public vote of confidence for what we are doing. With their dollars and their brands, they support the grand idea of a multitude of hopefully intelligent voices engaging in thoughtful discussion about photography of all kinds.

But let's not be confused however. While counting the number of click throughs or page views of a banner is mildly entertaining, the point of sponsoring this site is to get bodies in the door, to add subscribers (for the magazines), and to generate tangible sales. If we can reliably connect the dots between reading reviews on this site and buying photographs in the real world, then we're doing much more than just shouting into the void.

While each and every one of our 2010 sponsors is deserving of my heartfelt thanks and your disposable income, I would particularly like to highlight the support of Janet Borden Inc. (here). Janet's gallery has been an anchor sponsor of this site for the entire year, taking the top banner slot month after month. She has been tirelessly enthusiastic about the evolution of this blog, and has been quick to point out my delusions and misguided opinions with her biting wit. Her persistent encouragement, even when her show of the moment didn't get 3 STARS, has been invaluable. If you find enjoyment in what we are doing here, I urge you to reward Janet for giving her support when it wasn't even remotely obvious. Get down to Soho and buy that Lee Friedlander, Tina Barney, Martin Parr (or whoever) that you have been coveting, and tell Janet that one of the reasons you are there with your dollars out is that you read DLK COLLECTION. You can thank me by thanking her.

Our other monthly sponsors also deserve your attention and your patronage. They have chosen to stand and be counted as well, so open your wallets folks and show them you value their commitment to independent photography writing:

Amador Gallery (here)
ClampArt (here)
Robert Koch Gallery (here)
Lee Gallery (here)
Photograph magazine (here)
Von Lintel Gallery (here)

Finally, I'd like to send out an authentic thank you to the many sponsors (past, present and future) of other photography blogs. This is a vibrant and collegial community and the dollars that are spent in support of Joerg Colberg or AD Coleman, Marc Feustel or Andy Adams, or countless other important voices are critical to keeping them on the air. I know from experience: don't underestimate what a small amount of support will do for the confidence of a writer wondering if they can feed the beast with something intelligent for yet another day. And by the way, their daily traffic of targeted, photography-loving visitors is likely larger than the entire client database of most galleries.

This is the last post of 2010. We'll be back in January, starting with the posts that didn't get done this week: the 2010 Auction Summary, the Top 10 Photobooks of 2010, and hopefully some reviews of books that came out from under the tree. Happy Holidays!

Jesse Burke: Intertidal @ClampArt

JTF (just the facts): A total of 32 color images, framed in white with no mat, hung edge to edge in an undulating up and down pattern across the walls of the single room gallery space. The digital c-prints range in size between 11x14 and 38x30, with a variety of intermediate sizes. The works were made between 2004 and 2010, and have been printed in two sizes each, in editions of 8. A monograph of this body of work, published by Decode Books (here), is available from the gallery for $35.(Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: Jesse Burke's subtle photographs of stereotypical male activities are consistently filled with contradictions. They tackle the underlying rift between society's surface assumptions about masculinity and the more complicated reality of how men really behave, exposing tensions and vulnerabilities that fall beyond a simplistic view of male toughness. These are introspective pictures, taken with tenderness and understanding, a more nuanced and less polarized portrait of the "Fight Club" search for male meaning in the modern world.

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The show covers a broad range of conventional masculine subjects, with an eye for detail: a pyramid of beer cans, push-ups, deer hunting, dogs, eye black, camouflage gear, basketball hoops at night, and mud. My favorite pictures chronicle the quintessential male ritual of shotgunning a beer. Burke photographs his subjects at the moment just after they have finished the race or the chest-thumping spectacle, when the beer runs down the front of their shirts and they stand wide-eyed and jolted by the rush of alcohol. The moment is filled with an unvarnished swirl of emotions: exhilaration, ridiculousness, testing, physical pain, and forced but somehow real camaraderie. These images are juxtaposed with a variety of gentler landscapes and more intimate shirtless portraits, posed against floral backgrounds. A self-portrait of the photographer holding his fragile baby in front of a stack of rough sawed logs poignantly captures the irony and conflict of his own male role.

It would be easy for a project like this to veer off into worn-out and obvious beer ad mockery, but Burke does an excellent job of keeping the feelings and symbols simple and authentic, opening up the stresses and paradoxes underneath the typical male stereotype without going overboard. As a result, the installation has the feel of a quiet discussion, where the men let their guard down for a just moment and expose their unprotected, imperfect selves.
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Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced between $700 and $2200, based on size, with many different intermediate prices. Since this is Burke's first solo show in New York, it is not at all surprising that his work has not yet made it to the secondary markets. Gallery retail is thus the only option for interested collectors at this point.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here) and blog (here)
• Review: New Yorker (here)

Jesse Burke: Intertidal

Through July 9th

Clamp Art

521-531 West 25th Street

New York, NY 10001

Ion Zupcu: Painted Cubes @Clamp Art

JTF (just the facts): A total of 17 black and white works, framed in white with no mat, and hung against grey walls in the single room gallery space. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints, made in 2009 or 2010. Each image comes in one of two sizes: 15x15, in editions of 15, and 30x30, in editions of 5. There are 4 large prints and 13 small prints in the show. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: Romanian photographer Ion Zupcu's new images are a theme and variation exercise in photographing painted cubes, extending and expanding the stripped down aesthetic vocabulary of Minimalism by employing techniques specific to photography. While Albers, Judd, LeWitt, and many others went down this road long ago, Zupcu has augmented his contemporary toolkit with multiple exposures, blurs, and gelatin silver tonality/luminescence, all in an effort to find new vantage points on pared down forms and essential geometries.

Starting with the single square face of a cube and working up to more three dimensional views of multiple sides, Zupcu experiments with photographic tonality and contrast, testing the subtle gradations between white on white, black on white, and white on black. Further complexities of pattern and repetition come from arrays and grids of these same cubes, with multiple photographic exposures creating more complicated intersections and overlays. Scale and depth become hard to measure, with ghostly blurs and painterly textures softening the edges.
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While these works are rooted in the simplicity and purity of modular form, they seem to lack the strong conceptual foundation that lay underneath the original Minimalist approach; these geometric images aren't blunt and brainy or particularly challenging and perception-altering. As such, this show represents a kinder, more inviting strain of retro-Minimalism, warmed up with a dash of quiet elegance and meditative finesse.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows: the 15x15 prints are $1200 each and the 30x30 prints are $3000 each. Zupcu's photographs have not yet entered the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point. Zupcu is also represented by the Halsted Gallery in Michigan (here).

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)

Ion Zupcu: Painted Cubes
Through May 28th

Clamp Art
521-531 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Amy Stein: Domesticated @Clamp Art

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 color images, framed in white with no mat, hung in the main gallery space and the small side alcove. The works are digital c-prints, in two sizes: 24x30 (in editions of 10+2AP) and 30x40 (in editions of 3+2AP). The show includes 17 images in the small size and 1 in the large size; all of the works were made between 2005 and 2008. 12 of the images can be found in the book Domesticated, published by Photolucida (here), and available from the gallery for $24. There are 6 new images (not included in the book, but part of the same series) on view as well. (Marginal installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The scenes depicted in Amy Stein’s Domesticated series chronicle the borderlands of the human and animal worlds, the places where two previously separate habitats now overlap and rub together, forced into precarious proximity by the encroachment of civilization on untamed nature: wolves are in the garbage, bobcats lounge on a construction site, bears are near the swimming pool, and deer are in the greenhouse and underneath the window. The images are full of confrontations and tests, separations and boundaries, anxiety and curiosity, both sides keeping a wary distance, and watching carefully.

It has already been well publicized that Stein uses stuffed animals (taxidermy) to create her diorama-like stories; these are not documentary photographs of real life events, but re-enactments of incidents and memories culled from conversations with residents of a small town in Northern Pennsylvania. This is I think a critical piece of information for understanding these works; documentary images of these same events would look different; they’d be messier, or too fleeting to have been captured at all, or most likely, the real thing happened in an altogether less interesting manner.

So what we actually have in these photographs is the recreation of memory and the embellishment of tales and legends told again and again. This kind of thinking on the part of the artist seems highly rooted in the history and practice of painting; much less so in the realm of photography (particularly “straight” photography). And so while it is relatively straightforward to see narrative and stylistic parallels with the work of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson or even certain film makers here, I think the more interesting connections are to be made to painting, both in the process steps of formulating an image from memory and transferring it into a more easily digestible and compact form, and in the borrowings and echoes of art history, of allegorical works, and of fables, myths and fairy tales. Stein’s works are a synthesized reality, carefully composed for maximum narrative effect. The whole project shouts 19th century painting to me, even though the images have been executed by a contemporary photographer.

While not every image in the show packs a punch, the overall theme of human/animal interaction is deftly explored from a variety of vantage points in these pictures, coming to a complex and nuanced set of conclusions; perhaps this why the book form has been so successful for this body of work (it has won awards from Critical Mass in 2007 and the New York Photo Festival in 2008). All in, this is a convincing first New York solo show. What I like best is that she seems to have found practical ways to connect photography to painting, and to leverage the strengths of both to generate some unexpected and satisfying outcomes.
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Collector's POV: The images in the show are priced based on size and location in the edition. The smaller prints range between $2500 and $5000; the larger prints start at $4500 (I’m not sure of the end of the edition price for the larger pictures). Stein’s work has no history to date in the secondary markets, so collectors will need to work within the gallery system to access her prints. For those on the West coast, Stein is also represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco (here).

While Stein’s work does not fit into our specific collecting program, I particularly enjoyed seeing the image Backyard, 2007 (here), which eerily reminded me of Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 (here, in the Prado).

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist website (here) and blog (here)
• Review of UPenn talk (here)
• Interview with The Rumpus (here)

Amy Stein: Domesticated
Through October 31st

Clamp Art
521-531 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001