Diana Cooper, My Eye Travels* @Postmasters

JTF (just the facts): A total of 32 photographic works/installations, unframed and adhered directly to the walls, and hung in the entry area and the front and back gallery spaces. 15 of the works are photographs (digital c-prints?), ranging in size from 6x7 to 150x59; these prints are available in editions of 5. The rest of the works are mixed media sculptures/collages, ranging in size from 5x5 to 148x118; these works are either unique or available in editions of 2. All of the works were made in 2012-2013. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: With digital photography now increasingly ubiquitous and malleable as a medium, many artists that have traditionally spent their time exploring the boundaries of other materials have quietly begun to add a camera to their proverbial toolboxes. Given her history, Diana Cooper can in no way be rightfully categorized as a photographer; her previous works have generally lived in the realms of sculpture and installation, with a dash of painting and drawing thrown in for good measure. And yet, in her newest show, every single work is in some shape or form meaningfully photographic, and many are what we might call straightforward prints. It is clear that photography has been wholly absorbed into her artistic practice, offering her new methods for generating patterns and playing with space.

 

In her large mixed media installations, Cooper uses the flatness of photographs to provide a foundation layer for three dimensional building, where the rich textures of found objects are employed as collaged structural imagery. Pictures of bulbous green moss morph into real Astroturf, while photographs of tactile bales of recycled cans and paper and towers of stacked bins grow into plastic meshes of construction netting and rigid geometric filters and screens. In some cases, the photographs are used in layers of recursive reference, where images of red pipes and mirrors sit underneath physical manifestations of those same objects, pushing on notions of scale and repetition. In others, Cooper is drawn to simple ordered patterns, where candy colored stadium seats are piled into a flattened uneven kaleidoscope of multiplied visual motifs. In every case, the photographs fit seamlessly into her systematic approach to construction, mixing the crispness of man made images with the organic overlapped chaos of her open ended installations.

 

The rest of the works on view play with the trompe l'oeil properties of photography, adding extra air vents and skylights to the gallery space. Flat security cameras and monitors float on walls and in corners, while a fake security gate is pulled down near the door. She even adds extra metal plates to the floor and jams in a few stand pipes along one wall. Overall, it's an effective, mind bending manipulation of the space. I didn't see these photographs as particularly durable stand alone works, but more as if she had made the whole gallery into one big Diana Cooper installation, with the jittering space bending in on itself.

 

I think there is a fascinating short term difference between contemporary photographers who add sculptural qualities to their work and sculptors who add photographic qualities to theirs. It seems to me that the photographer still tends to see the boundaries of the traditional print as sacred, building up with three dimensional textures and physical collaging/manipulations ("sculptural photography"), while the sculptor tends to see photography as something less fixed, to be employed in the more adaptable and extensible form of digital imagination ("photographic sculpture"). Eventually, I think they'll both end up in the same place, but for now, the approaches still have an intellectual point of view gap that separates them. Diana Cooper is clearly on the side of the sculptors, less interested in photography as an end point in and of itself, and more concerned with how photographic imagery can be used to extend and enhance her already complex artistic investigations. But those of us interested in the future of photography need to track artists like her, as she's showing us an alternate path, and one that will ultimately merge with the one we're following.

Collector's POV: The works in this show range in price from $1000 for the smallest single image photographs to $40000 for the largest mixed media installations. Cooper's work has very little secondary market history (and none at all in the markets for photography), so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Works lost in Hurricane Sandy (here)
• Features/Reviews: ARTnews (here), TimeOut New York (here), Artinfo (here)

 

Diana Cooper, My Eye Travels*

Through February 9th

 

Postmasters

459 West 19th Street

New York, NY 10011

Holly Zausner, A Small Criminal Enterprise @Postmasters

JTF (just the facts): A total of 20 photographic works and 1 film, generally framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the entry area, the front and back gallery spaces, and the studio area. The super 16mm film, entitled Unseen, has a running time roughly 17 minutes and is available in an edition of 5+2AP; it was made in 2007. The other works are unique photo collages constructed from images/stills from the film, each collage made between 2009 and 2012. Physical dimensions range from 15x20 to 60x90 (or reverse). There are 18 single work collages and 1 diptych on view. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The large photographic image made up of thousands of tiny images as stand ins for pixels has now become a digital era cliche. While countless artists have explored this approach (Rashid Rana and Alex Guofeng Cao are just two of many), the juxtaposed ironies of this method have now become too obvious and predictable; the novelty has worn off and I'm sure it will only be a matter of time before a software filter will exist to turn family snapshots into my own personal digital mosaics. With the inevitable dumbing down of this trend running as backdrop, Holly Zausner's shrewd new photo collages come as even more of a surprise.

The best way to comprehend this show is to start with the short film running on a video screen in the back room. In it, Zausner drags oversized elongated alien-looking bodies (alternately in blue and yellow) through the wide streets of Berlin, her heels clicking rhythmically as she wanders through empty sidewalks and seemingly abandoned train stations, carefully cradling the heads of her soft passengers. Her ceaseless travels take her to a decaying amusement park (toppled dinosaurs, rusty roller coasters), factories churning out newspapers and loaves of bread, and the sculpture garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie, where a menacing tiger inexplicably prowls among the reflecting pools and the hedges. Her ultimate destination is a quiet room filled with Baroque statues at the Bode Museum, where she is finally able to deposit her cargo, the blue form splayed on the floor in well deserved rest.

Starting with film stills and images from this stylized performance (in both positive and negative, black and white and color), she proceeds to do just the opposite of all the other digital stitchers: she doesn't collage them into some larger recognizable image which we will find clever, but instead arranges them into increasingly abstract compositions that swirl and stutter like static. In fact, she actually meticulously pastes them together image by image, foregoing the simplicity of scans for the hand craftedness of highly organized grids. The most logical antecedent here is really Ray Metzker's masterful composites, although Zausner seems more interested in allowing the underlying images to devolve into something illegible. In some cases, her large abstractions are found to be made of photographic blurs and smears of color, frustrating our ability to connect the intention back to the original film.

What we're left with is an open-ended, metaphorical story that then becomes even more obscure as it is translated into skittering, all-over collages. The works don't converge toward an overly simple reading, but instead diverge into something diffuse and fractal. It's as if the farther we delve into Zausner's symbolic narrative, the more it reveals itself as unknowable.
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Collector's POV: The collages in this show are priced based on size, as follows.

• 15x20: $3500 each
• 20x30: $5000
• 20x30 diptych: $6000
• 40x60 (or reverse): $15000 each
• 60x90 (or reverse): $25000 each

The film is priced at $15000. Zausner's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interview: Brooklyn Rail (here)
• Feature: BOMB (here)

Holly Zausner, A Small Criminal Enterprise
Through August 3rd

Postmasters
459 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011

Chris Verene, Family @Postmasters

JTF (just the facts): A total of 41 color photographs, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the reception and two main gallery rooms; a few additional images are apparently available for viewing in the office. All of the works are square format chromogenic prints with hand written captions. The prints are sized either 24x20 or 36x30, and both are printed in editions of 6+2AP. There are 11 images in the smaller size and 30 images in the larger size in the show. All of the works on display were taken between 1992 and 2010. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Twin Palms (here) and is available from the gallery for $65. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: If we were to organize a hypothetical photography exhibit called "The Family as Muse", there would be a nearly endless variety of superlative imagery to choose from. Maybe we might select images from Sally Mann, Nicholas Nixon, and Tina Barney, or perhaps Doug DuBois, Larry Sultan, Mitch Epstein and Nan Goldin, or really any number of deserving others. Chris Verene's pictures of his extended family would happily fit into this sprawling exhibition, and would stick out for their unflinching sense of documentary reality.

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Plenty of photographers have pointed their cameras as loved ones and come out with images that are filled with dignity, tenderness, and inner strength. Verene's images have these same qualities, but it is his willingness to see eccentricities and quirks, weaknesses and failures in these people that makes these photographs original. An outsider might make these same pictures with a sense of subtle mockery or condescension, but with Verene as an insider in this story of real family struggle, the images become alternately heartbreaking and hopeful.

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Part of the reason this happens is that Verne's images are adorned with small texts that act like a quiet voice over, providing an oral storyline to go with the visual one on the wall. By giving these people names and context, the stories become specific, individual and personal, even though they may represent more universal conditions we can all identify with. A man stands with a strange expression on his face, near an empty swing set made of old hubcaps; the text reads "after the divorce, Steve never saw his girls again"; suddenly an odd and unidentifiable scene is transformed into something crushingly woeful. A mother tends to a pair of girls in their carseats; the text reads "Amber and her girls are living in her car", and again, a thin film of agony alters the mood.

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As you wander through the galleries, the stories cover multiple generations and chronicle divorces, lost jobs, babies, packs of kids and dogs, trailers, making due and getting by. Time passes and we see kids grow and and parents age; new challenges replace old ones. And yet there are surprising moments of simple joy buried in these hard and often depressing situations: kids being swung in circles by their arms, the delight of a Renaissance Faire costume, the bliss of lying on your back in the driveway.
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At their best, Verene's images are condensed emotion, densely packed moments of aching, where the action has taken place off stage and the results are less obvious but all the more distressing. His pictures successfully put an intimate face on the economic hardship and poverty that has touched many in recent years, his true stories more subtly tragic than any he could have dreamed up.

Collector's POV: Regardless of size, the prints in this show are priced in ratcheting editions, starting at $2500, moving through $3500, $5000, and $8000, and ending at $10000, with the last print reserved for institutional buyers. Verene's work has not reached the secondary markets with any consistency, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Photo Booth (here)
• Interview: Amy Stein (here)

Chris Verene, Family

Through October 16th

Postmasters
459 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011