Will Steacy, Down These Mean Streets @Mazzeo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 color images, framed in black with no mat, and hung against grey walls in the entry and main gallery spaces. The pigmented ink prints come in two sizes (or reverse): 16x20 (in editions of 5+2AP) and 24x30 (in editions of 3+2AP). While no dates were given on the gallery checklist, I think we can safely assume that all of these images were made in the past few years. A 16-page tabloid newspaper in both color and black and white is available from the gallery for $5. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The plight of our inner cities isn’t exactly a new topic in the world of contemporary photography. Many photographers have pointed their cameras at our abandoned houses, empty streets, and broken neighborhoods, most with an air of clinical detachment or meticulous anthropological documentation, searching for abstract photographic beauty or subtle irony hidden amid the grit. Will Steacy’s photographs, taken at night while wandering in the transitional zones between airports and urban areas in some of America’s best known cities, have no such comfortable, eyes-averted distance. They are right up in your face, with a level of aggressive confrontation that is unavoidable. This is an artist with a chip on his shoulder, willing to take some risks to jolt us out of our stupor, combining the eye of an investigative reporter with the angry heart of a dramatic story teller.

One wall in the reception area of the gallery is blanketed in a dense, highly personal installation of 3x4 photographs, maps, airline stubs, lottery tickets, news articles, terrorist mug shots, pulp novel covers, flattened beer cans, book pages, plastic booze flasks, matchbooks, taxicab licenses, and other miscellaneous artifacts and ephemera collected along the way during this project, all covered and annotated with scrawled handwriting. It’s the kind of manic, obsessive, intelligent, rage-filled wall that you normally find in the basement lair of a serial killer in the movies. It weaves failings in banking, joblessness, wars, terrorism, foreclosures, broken education, and unaffordable health care together with fear, neglect, and devastation, all wrapped up with an unforgiving rawness that is entirely mesmerizing and real. The wrench Steacy used for protection during his night time shoots is collaged next to his old labor union card; a broken newspaper box lies in front, with strewn trash on the floor nearby. It is a harrowing, multi-dimensional portrait of an artist thoroughly annoyed by the destruction of the American Dream and exasperated at our complicit avoidance of seeing what is happening or doing anything about it.

Nearly all of the larger photographs in the main gallery are awash in the malignant glare of acidic streetlights. They depict bullet holes, cigarette butts, boarded up housing projects, homeless people, gutter trash, and vacant lots, but they do so without voyeuristic sentimentality or cheap sensationalism. Even though Steacy is an outsider to these particular communities, his viewpoint comes from within, more in a social documentary style steeped in everyday realism. He has chosen emblematic scenes that have a formal clarity, with an added edge of anxiety and danger. A coffee cup lies inside a broken newspaper vending machine, a bus bench is reduced to two sawed off stubs, a purse lies abandoned on the sidewalk, and a fence encircles a dark brick housing facility, a barrier for both those wanting to get in and those wanting to get out. The sense of being out-in-the-open and alone is palpable.

In some ways, this isn’t the easiest work to like. It holds up a mirror to a world we have created for ourselves that isn’t particularly pretty. What I find most memorable is that there is a sense of fighting spirit in these pictures; the artist has dug deeply and worked hard to tell these sometimes bleak and unforgiving stories. As result, they have power and intensity that is absent in other similar drive-by projects of ruined cities. Steacy has immersed himself in this neglected and forgotten part of our world, made it his own, and is clearly taking it personally.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced in rising editions. The 16x20 works begin at $1200 and rise to $2200; the 24x30 works begin at $2000 and rise to $3500. Steacy's work is not yet available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.
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As an aside, I think these images will make a terrific book, especially if the photographer adds in some of the back stories and ideas found in the chaotic installation.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here) and blog (here)
• Review: New Yorker (here)
• Interviews: Conscientious (here), BOMBlog (here)
• Feature: Conscientious (here)

Will Steacy, Down These Mean Streets
Through July 30th

Michael Mazzeo Gallery
526 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Will Steacy in Harper's

I was recently flipping through the new August issue of Harper's (here) and came across a short photo essay/portfolio (9 images) drawn from Will Steacy's Down These Mean Streets project. It seems that all of our media outlets are now searching for contemporary work that somehow captures the current angst of the nation; scenes of struggle against failure, and despair, and hopelessness, modern day equivalents of the dust bowl shots of the FSA photographers (Evans, Lange, Rothstein et al.). They want to point our attention to the vacant lots and For Rent signs, the abandoned buildings and empty neighborhoods, as if they weren't obviously visible in every town in America.

What I like about Will Steacy's approach to this now overexposed subject is that rather than give us the standard dreary deadpan view of these marginal grey neighborhoods, he has explored this terrain at night, when the street lights add a toxic glare to the surroundings and the threat of undefined danger is now out in the open rather than hiding in the shadows. (Burned Car, Los Angeles, 2009, via Conscientious, at right.) There is a subtle electric buzz in these pictures, capturing that tingling feeling when your senses are on high alert; a mixture of uneasy anxiety, excitement, and a hint of fear, knowing that you are a bit exposed out here in the night. The addition of the darkness turns these streets from merely exhausted and depressing into something altogether more desperate.

And yet these kinds of shadowlands and in between zones are everywhere in this country; dodgy areas of disrepair and decay that form the (growing) border areas between the "good" neighborhoods from coast to coast. So in some ways, the subject matter of these pictures is altogether unsurprising. And while we've seen them before, Steacy has found a way to infuse the rubble piles and security doors with the elusive spirit of the moment: nervous, a bit threatened, and undeniably on edge.

Collector's POV: Will Steacy is represented in New York by Michael Mazzeo Gallery (here). The images from this series come in two sizes, 16x20 and 24x30, priced at $1200 and $2000 respectively. My particular favorite of the images in the Harper's portfolio is Bench, Queens, 2008, an image of a wooden bus bench, sawed apart, leaving only the solitary metal supports.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here) and blog (here)
• Down These Mean Streets @NYU Gulf & Western Gallery, 2009 (here)
• Interviews: Conscientious (here), BOMBlog (here)

Transmutations, Abstraction in Nature @Mazzeo

JTF (just the facts): A group show of five different photographers: Caleb Charland (3 images), Christian Erroi (7), Yong Hee Kim (6), Sebastian Lemm (6), and Chris McCaw (6), hung in the entry and main gallery space. Charland's works come in two sizes (29x36 and 18x23), in editions of 5 and 10 respectively, and were made in 2008-2009. Erroi's works are Kodak Enduraclear on Plexiglas and digital c-prints, in three sizes (7x11, 17x17, and 20x30) in editions of 10, 5, and 7 respectively, all made in 2008. Kim's works are Kodak metallic c-prints, in two sizes (18x18 and 40x40) in editions of 10 and 7 respectively, made in 2004-2005. Lemm's works are pigment ink prints in three sizes (15x12, 30x24, and 60x48) in editions of 5, 5, and 3 respectively, all made in 2008, and McCaw's works are unique gelatin silver paper negatives in a variety of sizes (10x8, 14x11, 12x20, and 24x20), all from 2008. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The tight group show now on view at Michael Mazzeo is an exploration of a narrow slice of abstraction in contemporary photography, the complex use of natural forms and processes being the common theme to these particular works and artists.

While I found all of the works in the exhibit intellectually thought provoking (how could the use of bacteria in the emulsion, direct images of the sun, and swirling flora embedded in sculptural blocks of Lucite not be intriguing at some level?), the two standout sets of work to my eyes came from Sebastian Lemm and Chris McCaw.

In Lemm's series Strata (image top right), the artist builds up dense black and white images composed of thinly layered tree branches, taking Harry Callahan's multiple exposure tree pictures to their ultimate end point. The works have a delicate, all-over line drawing effect.

McCaw's solarized works are made via extended time exposures of the sun, creating burns, scrapes and scars on the paper (image at right, bottom). Spots and trails of light skim across otherwise darkened skies. What I like about these works is the feeling of the process almost out of control; instead of a run of the mill photogram, these images have crossed the line, gotten burned or charred, and therefore become something altogether more real.

Overall, I found this to be a well edited show of complementary artists, each working along the outer edges of photography, exploring how process and abstraction come together.

Collector's POV: Here's a quick rundown on all the prices: Charland's works are priced either at $1500 or $2500 based on size; Erroi's works are priced between $1700 and $4000; Kim's works are either $2200 or $4000, again based on size; Lemm's works range from $800 to $6000 based on size, and McCaw's works are priced between $2000 and $6000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Caleb Charland artist site (here)
• Christian Erroi artist site (here)
• Yong Hee Kim artist site (here)
• Sebastian Lemm artist site (here)
• Chris McCaw artist site (here)

Transmutations, Abstraction in Nature
Through June 20th

Michael Mazzeo Gallery
526 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001