The Permanent Way @Apexart

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung in the two room divided gallery space. The show combines work from 5 contemporary photographers with railroad maps, hand colored wood engravings, vintage photo postcards (from the collection of Luc Sante) and other ephemera. The exhibit was curated by Brian Sholis. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included, with information on the number of works on view and image details for reference:

• Jeff Brouws: 3 archival pigment prints, each 37x44, from 2010 and 2011
• Justine Kurland: 3 c-prints, each 15x30 or 40x50 (or reverse), from 2007, 2008 and 2012
• Mark Ruwedel: 19 gelatin silver prints, each 8x10, from 1995-2005
• Victoria Sambunaris: 2 chromogenic print, each 39x55, from 2007 and 2010
• James Welling: 3 toned gelatin silver prints, each 18x22 (or reverse, from 1990 and 1991

Comments/Context: When we think about history in an academic, tell us the truth about the past sense, the one genre of photography that tends not to be considered particularly relevant is fine art photography. Without a second thought, we rely upon photojournalism and documentary photographs of various kinds to provide evidence for our backward looking interpretation of historical events, but we normally don't include photographs with art as a first purpose in this analysis. Perhaps we assume they are too subjective or slanted to be instructive. This collective bias is what makes The Permanent Way such an unexpected show - it's unabashedly a history lesson, and yet, the reasoned argument put forth is supported by fine art photographs as primary source material.

With the passage of the Pacific Railway Act 150 years ago this year, the US government unleashed what would become one of the most ambitious transformations of the American landscape ever undertaken. Land grants and rights of way enabled massive, industrial scale earthworks - bridge building, canyon cutting, rock blasting, path clearing, and track laying with a unprecedented scope. It was a fifty year whirlwind of engineered nation building, with commercial friendly rail lines spreading like blood vessels to every corner of the uninhabited West. Fast forward a century, and these railways are now permanently embedded in our landscapes, reshaping the way our towns and cities evolved, how our economy grew and developed, and how we see the land and its natural marvels. Along the way, the entire genre of American landscape photography was similarly remade.

Curator Brian Sholis has smartly mixed 19th century maps, photo post cards, and other vernacular material from the period with recent photographs made by five contemporary artists, each photographer employing a different approach to documenting the trains and railway infrastructure. None of these artists is a "train photographer" in the way that we might label O. Winston Link as such an artist; instead, the assembled group takes a broader view of the impact the trains have had (and continue to have) on the land and the communities that have grown up near the tracks. Victoria Sambunaris uses elevated views of bending arcs of freight cars and straight arrow tracks to tell complex, layered stories about the borderlands between the US and Mexico and the landscape of the Utah desert. Justine Kurland is perhaps more interested in the hobo subculture that has developed around the train system, and her images of the slow S curve of tracks that follow a river through the California mountain wilderness or the broad flat plains dominated by sky are quiet and lonely, measured by the contrast in scale between the rootless riders and the immensity of the land. Both Mark Ruwedel and Jeff Brouws examine the train system as a pattern of ruins; Ruwedel sees the formal Becher-style repetition in sharp V shaped cuts through rock and the dark holes of abandoned tunnels, while Brouws follows the empty railbeds as the thin paths vanish into the encroaching forest. And James Welling makes low angle black and white "portraits" of engines, evoking feelings that are alternately heroic and grimy.

Together, these photographs provide a varied, surprisingly unsentimental picture of the impact of the railroads on the American landscape. It's an effective proof that the downstream effects of the decisions made some 150 years ago still reverberate in increasingly complicated and nuanced ways, even when the trains have long since ceased to run in many cases. Most importantly, I think this show is a fabulous reminder that fine art photography can be a vital resource in helping to interpret the complexities of our collective past; we ought to thoughtfully mix history and art more often.

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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are not for sale. The contemporary photographers included in the exhibit are represented by the following New York galleries:

• Jeff Brouws: Robert Mann Gallery (here)
• Justine Kurland: Mitchell-Innes & Nash (here)
• Mark Ruwedel: Yossi Milo Gallery (here)
• Victoria Sambunaris: Yancey Richardson Gallery (here)
• James Welling: David Zwirner (here)

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews/Features: Modern Art Notes podcast (here), Artforum (here), Daily Beast (here)
• Interview: Design Observer (here)

The Permanent Way
Through July 28th
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Apexart
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013

Mark Ruwedel, Records @Milo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 32 black and white works (including single images, diptychs, and groups), framed in white and matted, and hung in the front and back galleries. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, taken between 2005 and 2011. (Installation shots at right.)

The works in the show come from the following projects/series. For each, the number of images on view is followed by the print details:

• Neighbors: 3 gelatin silver diptychs, each print 11x14 mounted on archival rag board, in editions of 5+2AP, from 2008-2011
• Desert Houses: 14 gelatin silver prints, either 15x19 or 8x10, each print mounted on archival rag board, both sizes in editions of 10+2AP, from 2005-2011
• Dusk: 10 gelatin silver prints, each print 11x14 mounted on archival rag board, in editions of 5+2AP, from 2006-2011
• Built/Not Built: The Smithson Panorama: 2 sets of 8 gelatin silver prints, each print 8x10, mounted  together as a single work on archival rag board, in an edition of 5+2AP, from 2010
• Records: 12 gelatin silver prints, each print 8x10 mounted on archival rag board, hung together as a single work, in an edition of 3+2AP, from 2009-2011
• 1212 Palms: 9 gelatin silver prints, each print 11x14 mounted on archival rag board, hung together as a single work, in an edition of 5+2AP, from 2006-2007
• Bomb Craters: 9 gelatin silver prints, each print 10x13 mounted on archival rag board, hung together as a single work, in an edition of 5+2AP, from 2008
• Splitting: 1 gelatin silver diptych, each print 11x14 mounted on archival rag board, in editions of 5+2AP, from 2009

Comments/Context: Mark Ruwedel's photographs provide an answer to one of the most complicated questions facing contemporary American land (not necessarily landscape) photography: how do we thoughtfully engage photographic history? His last major project, Westward the Course of Empire, documented the path of the railway system, in conceptual dialogue with 19th century greats like Watkins, O'Sullivan, and others. His newest pictures take on the sprawling beast of the New Topographics. The problem of how to move forward visually and conceptually given the lasting influence of this stylistic juggernaut isn't by any means a simple one. Walking too close to the past generates work that is either plainly derivative ("stuck in the 70s") or calmly reverential. What I like best about Ruwedel's new pictures is that they aren't afraid of this history. Instead, each project or series is like a crisp, cerebral, insider conversation, referencing bodies of work that have come before (including various strains of conceptual art as well as Land/Earth Art) but asking new questions and providing contemporary answers.
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A walk through the broader and taller galleries at Yossi Milo's new space is like a series of call and response discussions. Free standing houses alone in the desert (both in daylight and at dusk, taken with deadpan quiet formality) connect to any number of predecessors: John Divola, Robert Adams, and once again the Bechers. Other projects are more one-to-one: palm trees with Ed Rusha, split houses with Gordon Matta-Clark, warped vinyl LPs in the desert dirt with Lewis Baltz, and elegant salt encrusted bomb craters with scientific photography from the Manhattan Project. His investigation of Robert Smithson inverts The Spiral Jetty into a 360 degree panoramic view outward, and considers another location where a Smithson work was never built. Each series reprises characteristic motifs and styles, but unpacks them and pares them down further. The underlying ideas about land use, the built environment, reuse and waste, visual patterning and repetition, are all a continuation of the original concepts, but an extension and refinement rather than a hackneyed copy.

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In a world where the typology format has spread like a disease, I came away impressed that these pictures didn't seem tired. Most of the subjects here are decayed, abandoned, falling down, or hollowed out, but there is an elemental beauty to the shapes and geometries, the mirror images and echoes; roof lines, wood framing, blackened windows and flat expanses of scrubby desert provide plenty of raw material for theme and variation exercises and tonal gradation. But my main takeaway was that Ruwedel has absorbed the lessons of the relevant photographic past, but not let them prevent him from carefully and critically thinking about those ideas further. Mindful of the many traps, he seems to have avoided them, and in the process, expanded the conversation.

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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced based as follows, based on the project/series.

• Neighbors: $7500 each
• Desert Houses: $4500 or $2500, based on size
• Dusk: $6500 or $4500
• Built/Not Built: The Smithson Panorama: $20000
• Records: $25000
• 1212 Palms: $22000
• Bomb Craters: $18000
• Splitting: $9000

Ruwedel's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Review: Artefuse (here)
• Exhibit: Peabody Essex Museum, 2010 (here)

Mark Ruwedel, Records

Through April 7th

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Yossi Milo Gallery

245 Tenth Avenue

New York, NY 10001