Shen Wei, I Miss You Already @Cooney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 large scale color photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the divided gallery space. All of the works are digital chromogenic prints, made between 2009 and 2012. The prints come in two sizes: 20x30 (in editions of 5) and 30x45 (in editions of 3). The show includes 4 pictures in the smaller size and 6 in the larger size. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: Given that there aren't many male nudes in contemporary Chinese photography, Shen Wei's new self-portraits could certainly be called cultural outliers. His documents of self expression follow the path of the calm and the understated rather than the overtly provocative or the knowingly political, tracing an inward-looking personal exploration with remarkably restrained sensitivity. There is still, of course, tension in these pictures, but it is reserved and quiet, open but uncertain.

Most of Shen's images play with the angles of his body: bent knees on a window sill, an arched back bend, a straight leg interrupting a table top still life, a triangular elbow propping up his head. His graceful stance in a submerged boat, using his outstretched leg to make concentric ripples in the light dappled water reminded me of Thomas Eakins. A few others offer complex, unknowable situations and interactions: a hand on his neck that might be either a caress or a choke, a bedside scene flanked by a nude woman and a sprawled man that offers any number of possible explanations. Shadows engulf many of the photographs, drawing our attention to the central figure in the light and adding a layer of introspective melancholy.

The best of these photographs left me impressed with Shen's growing compositional talents. When the pictures work, he successfully walks the line between realism and lyricism, all within the context of something genuinely personal.

 

Collector's POV: The prints in this exhibit are priced in ratcheting editions, as follows: the 20x30 prints start at $2500 each and the 30x45 prints start at $3500 each (one print in this size had already reached $4500). Shen's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is still likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

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

Shen Wei, I Miss You Already

Through October 27th

 

Daniel Cooney Fine Art

508 West 26th Street (new location)

New York, NY 10001

Shen Wei, Chinese Sentiment @Cooney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 color photographs, unmatted and framed in black, and hung in the single room gallery space. All of the works are digital c-prints, taken between 2008 and 2010. The prints come in two sizes: 16x20 (in editions of 8) and 24x30 (in editions of 3). The show includes 17 pictures in the smaller size and 2 in the larger size. A monograph of this body of work has recently been published by Charles Lane Press (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Shen Wei's recent images of China fly in the face of the now familiar energetic, economic boom narrative that dominates the our media-saturated view of the Eastern giant. Whether his subject is a landscape, a still life, or a portrait, his images have a consistent emotional tenor, a formal sense of solitary, introspective reserve. There are no pictures of overcrowded chaotic streets filled with noisy bicycles here; instead Shen provides a sense of melancholy distance, where small moments of uncertain peace occur in the muted tones of a grey morning.
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Shen's portraits capture his sitters alone in their rooms or in fleeting glimpses of thoughtful repose; they are at once intimate and unknowable, buried in private stillness. His landscapes find a similar mood: the enveloping mist of a fountain, the rain splattered surface of an ornamental pond, a single figure watching a red paddle boat disappear under a bridge, or the head of a ticket booth attendant in the dark of the early evening. Even his still lifes have a sense of dull ache: the gooey leftovers of a sugar candy stick, an unopened plastic bag of noodle soup on a window sill, or the box of fancy pears in protective sheaths bought for a special occasion. Seen together, the different compositional forms coalesce into an overall sensitivity to the subtle action on the periphery of life, an awareness of the shifts that happen just outside the norwal sweep of our gaze.
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Overall, I liked the sense of understatement and restraint that Shen shows across this body of work. He successfully holds back from courting the obvious, and instead, dives deeper for something more durable and resonant.

Collector's POV: The prints in this exhibit are priced as follows: the 16x20 prints are $1500 each and the 24x30 prints are $2500 each. Shen's work has effectively no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point. 20x200 (here) also has some of his work for sale.
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My favorite image in the show was Tingwei, Shangahi, 2010; it's on the far left in the bottom installation shot and is also on the cover of the monograph. I like the quietly innocent, eyes-closed expression on her face and the way her hair spreads out on the long green grass; the image has a calm serenity, like the edge of a dream.

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

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Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here) and blog (here)
• Interview: Conscientious (here)

Shen Wei, Chinese Sentiment
Through June 4th

Daniel Cooney Fine Art
511 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Timothy Briner, Boonville @Cooney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 black and white images, framed in black and not matted, and hung in the single room gallery space and entry hall. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, taken in 2007 or 2008. The prints come in two sizes: 20x15 or reverse (in editions of 7) and 29x23 or reverse (in editions of 5). The show includes 12 pictures in the smaller size and 7 in the larger size. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The solitary road trip is a romantic fixture of human cultural history, its roots in the itinerant wanderings of Odysseus and its recent manifestations transformed by the automobile and our vast network of highways into something uniquely American. Often this journey is a search: a search for adventure and challenge, or home, or self, or just something authentic and new to experience. Artistic documents of legendary road trips, like those of Kerouac and Frank, have become touchstones for how we see ourselves.

Timothy Briner's photographic project Boonville isn't a road trip of world hot spots; there are no scenes of Shanghai, or Baghdad, or Bangalore, or wherever you might think the "action" is going on or history is in the making. Instead, Briner traveled to six small towns across America, all called Boonville; his unusual itinerary took him to New York, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, and California. Most importantly, Briner did his best not to be an anonymous traveler just passing through, inspecting these towns with the critical eye of an outsider. On the contrary, he grounded himself in the communities for weeks or months at a time, becoming familiar with the locals in a non-threatening way and getting to know the rhythms of everyday life in each place. When the images from the far flung Boonvilles are brought together and juxtaposed, they form a unique portrait of the commonalities of small towns in contemporary America, as seen from the inside. Regardless of the specific zip code, the emotional terrain seems remarkably similar.

Like many emerging photographers of this generation, Briner's artistic approach seems descended from the school of Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, and more recently Alec Soth, where environmental portraits, still lifes, architectural views, and documentary scenes are combined into more nuanced and personal narratives. These images also show fleeting glimpses of Walker Evans, Robert Adams, and George Tice, all of whom were/are interested in the routines of daily life in American towns and cities.

What I like about this body of work is that Briner has captured the slow pace and sense of restless ennui that pervades many shrinking small towns; there just isn't a lot to do. The high school wrestlers and cheerleaders are earnest but bored, hunting is a prime hobby, and abandoned houses/cars, dreary roadside bars, and lingering teenagers tell the story of squelched optimism. We've landed in present day Anytown, USA, and the reality isn't very promising; folks are gritting their teeth and scraping out a life, but on the whole, it's a pretty gloomy scene.

My favorite image in the show is of a front yard in Boonville, MO, where two deer skins are slung across the hood of a dated car, with a second vehicle with huge sport tires up on blocks in the background; it's a classic scene of rural America. While there are other memorable images in this small show, I think the work will be more powerful and effective in book form, where a larger number of pictures can be carefully sequenced to get at the subtleties of the overall small town story. All in, this is a solid show, and a good reminder that a road trip back into the real world can be just the thing for an emerging artist looking for his or her entry point into photography; it's a move away from self-conscious art for art's sake and a step back into the realm of the genuine.

Collector's POV: The images in this exhibit are reasonably priced at $1000 or $1500 each, depending on size. Since Briner's work has effectively no secondary market history, gallery retail is really the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interviews: Too Much Chocolate (here), We Can't Paint (here), Exposure Compensation (here)

Timothy Briner, Boonville
Through February 27th

Daniel Cooney Fine Art
511 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Tim Roda, Family Matters @Daniel Cooney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 21 black and white gelatin silver prints, binder clipped to the wall (not framed) in the single room gallery. The works range in size from 15x21 to 35x52, are printed in editions of 8, and were made between 2004 and 2009.(Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Tim Roda's photographs are like film stills from old home movies. The grainy black and white images are full of theatrical silliness, with scavenged but elaborate stage sets, unlikely costumes, and improvised narratives. Father and son play the roles of actors, alternating between irreverent humor, exciting drama, and the joyful craziness of make believe: bicycles, windmills, a towering dunce cap, and some extra long legs all find a way into their surreal stories.

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The images themselves use wide contrasts of bright light and dark shadow to create a rough cinematic atmosphere, appropriately unfinished and raw. What I like best about the work is the genuine connection between the father and son: the creative working together, the whimsical games and joshing, the messy experimentation without any specific goal or endpoint; it's often not exactly clear what is going on or whether it is finished, but it is clear that fun is being had by everyone involved. This bond gives the pictures a surprising tone of tender nostalgia, without crossing the line into the soupy or saccharine.

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If part of the role of art is to give us insights into our own lives, this body of work is a good reminder that meaningful family entertainment need not include a screen (TV, video games, computers and the like) or something expensive, but that with enough imagination and effort, it can be made from almost anything at all.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are reasonably priced, asking between $1300 and $2000, based on size. Roda's work has no auction history, so gallery retail is the only option for accessing the work at this point.

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When I first heard about this show, given that the work doesn't really fit into any of our genres, I thought it was probably one I would miss. But another collector whose affinities are more in line with Roda's approach sent me a quick note and encouraged me to check it out. I'm glad I did; the work was much stronger and more moving than I had expected.

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

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Transit Hub:

• Interview with Daily Serving, 2008 (here)
• Exhibit at MoCP, Chicago, 2007 (here)

Tim Roda, Family Matters

Through October 31st

Daniel Cooney Fine Art

511 West 25th Street

New York, NY 10001

Christoph Gielen, Arcadia @Cooney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 large scale color Cibachrome images, framed in white and displayed throughout the small gallery. Prints come in two sizes (22x28 and 40x50), in editions of 7. Negatives are from 2004-2008. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Over the history of the medium, aerial photography has evolved its own distinct subculture, buried inside the larger frameworks of various commercial and artistic endeavors. Starting with Nadar back in the 19th century, people have been fascinated with pictures from the air. We have used aerial pictures for cartography and topography, overhead surveillance, and a never ending array of glossy travel books named things like Above the Pyramids or Over Indianapolis. In the realm of aerial art, photographers like William Garnett and Ed Ruscha set out the playing field, to be followed by artists like Marilyn Bridges, Emmet Gowin, and more recently David Maisel and Gerco de Ruijter (among others).

Christoph Gielen has stepped into this tradition with the images in his first solo NY exhibition, Arcadia, now on view at Daniel Cooney. Gielen has focused his attention on the human built environment, from tangled freeways to dense suburban subdivisions and housing projects, in locations spanning Berlin, Shanghai, Kowloon and southern California. Most of the images have no horizon line, reducing the subject matter to geometric lines and patterns.

Gielen clearly shares a viewpoint with the New Topographic photographers of the 1970s (Robert Adams especially), who highlighted the downsides to suburban sprawl, both in terms of its damage to the environment and its life sapping monotony. While Gielen's images have a simple decorative beauty, the not-so-subtle message is that these things we have built are more than a little scary. The show's ironic title (Arcadia being the essence of a serene, classical place) is another reminder that while we may have designed these worlds with the best of intentions, they haven't turned out to be the paradise we envisioned.

The artist's website can be found here.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are retailing for $1800 and $3800 based on size. While Gielen's images are well made and often striking, they haven't moved the ball forward much in terms of aerial photography. While we have seen much of this kind of thing before, there are a few images in the show that point to a continued evolution toward a more abstract approach, further drawing out new and subtle societal impacts resulting from the aging of these built environments. I was particularly interested to note the changing details of the faceless developments, as the trees grew bigger and broader and the inhabitants had time to begin to personalize their plots. Perhaps the chaos of humanity and nature will one day drown out the perfect geometries of the designers.

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

Christoph Gielen, Arcadia
Through January 31st

Daniel Cooney Fine Art
511 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001