Lisa Kereszi, The Party's Over @Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 large scale color images, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in main gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made between 2005 and 2010. The show contains images in two sizes: 30x40 and 40x50; there are 8 images in the smaller size and 2 images in the larger size on view. All of the prints are available in editions of 5. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: In contrast to the recent wave of experimentation and boundary breaking in contemporary photography, there is something altogether straightforward and traditional about Lisa Kereszi's new group of photographs. The artworks show a knowing respect for old school photographic values and visual approaches: her compositions are spare and formal, her subjects are mostly centered in the frame, her small people-less vignettes are carefully picked from the real world, and her prints are made with attention to detail. While they have a strong contemporary flavor, these photographs are firmly rooted in a familiar vocabulary.

This body of work is centered on images of decaying amusement: a disco ball packed up in a cardboard box, a lonely pole and dart board in an empty swinger's club, the bright portholes and faded undersea mural of a swimming pool, and a pile of electric signs (presumably from shuttered or rebranded Holiday Inns) ready for scrap. The images are silent and deserted, wallowing in a melancholy mood of morning after hangovers and faded memories. A topless bar and an ornate theater are both captured as reflections in thin puddles, and a brittle plastic shark emerges from a stagnant pool, its dinner of a fake hand no longer particularly scary.
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While these images don't fall directly into the category of ruin porn, they certainly depict a tired, worn out, left behind atmosphere, and can easily be placed alongside other work from the second half of the 2000s, when this desperate, exhausted, frustrated mindset was most prevalent. There is a depressing sense of delusional futility in these pictures, quietly beautiful at some level, but still discouragingly sad.
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Collector's POV: The prints in the show are priced based on size. The 30x40 prints range from $5150 to $6150 each, while the 40x50 prints are $6900 each. Kereszi's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Yale faculty page (here)

Lisa Kereszi, The Party's Over

Through July 6th

  

Yancey Richardson Gallery

535 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

Lisa Kereszi, Fantasies, @Yancey Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 6 color images, all mounted to board and not framed, hung in the smaller project gallery in the back. All of the images are 20x24, in editions of 5. The negatives are from the period 2000-2003. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: First published in 1976, Susan Meiselas' Carnival Strippers pulled back the curtain on the lives of the women who worked at strip shows, and the men who came to watch them. It was a compelling portrait of vulnerable lives in a tired, alienated existence, and it became a classic in the history of photography. Part of what was unusual about this project was that it had several viewpoints: the men watching the women, the women performing and watching the men, and Meiselas watching them both.

Several decades later, Lisa Kereszi has taken a walk down the same road, and found that not much has changed in the intervening decades. Her work is split between off stage views of strippers and burlesque performers and empty views of worn clubs and theaters. While Meiselas often focused on the interaction between performer and voyeur, Kereszi has chosen quieter shadowy moments, where the racy peep show fantasy has been exposed as a fraud - a dancer mundanely changing her shoes, or a tawdry stage with plywood walls and a cheap mirrored disco ball. While the pictures are well made, when the lights are on, 1980s chic is pretty dreary and uninspiring.

Collector's POV: The prints in the show are priced between $2100 and $2600. Since this show is so small (6 pictures), it's hard to draw a conclusion about the overall nature of the work, since some of the images are fragmented interior shots, while others are more emotionally charged documentary portraits. Perhaps the book is a better vehicle for a more deep and nuanced narrative.
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Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• The artist's website (here)
• Video of Kereszi on Governor's Island (here)
• Review of Fantasies at 5B4 (here)
• 50 States Project (here)
• Dikeou Collection (here)

Lisa Kereszi, Fantasies

Through May 9th

Yancey Richardson Gallery

535 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011