Travess Smalley, Capture Physical Presence @Higher Pictures

JTF (just the facts): A total of 6 large scale photographic works, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are unique pigment prints, made in 2011. Physical sizes range from 42x32 to 47x34. This is the artist's first solo show in New York. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Travess Smalley is out exploring the undefined borderlands of what we used to traditionally call photography. Using neither camera nor darkroom, he has instead married a flatbed scanner with the digital manipulations of Photoshop, pushing aesthetic boundaries by capturing, editing, printing, and cutting in a never ending circle of iterative digital collage. What separates Smalley from the growing legion of slick Photoshop jockeys and their crisp digital mashups is his incorporation of the tactile and the physical, or more broadly, his innovate way of connecting the immediacy of authentic texture with the power of software in a kind of lo-tech/hi-tech hybrid.

The cut paper abstraction has always been a staple of art school photographic experimentation, but Smalley's version of this studio practice is dynamic and multi-layered rather than muted and static, less about the nuances of falling light and more about the action of repetitive stratified creation. Construction paper is Xacto knifed into arcs and angles, then arranged and scanned, the process leaving behind tiny ghosts and shadows like the edges of photocopied zines. Color and pattern run the gamut from fine gradients and tight repetitions to expressive gestural lines and swirling psychedelic blobs. Gritty grainy texture is always present, no matter how frenetic and complex the compositions get - there is always a sense of being grounded in some kind of physical reality, even when highly engineered modifications are taking place. Piled into layer upon layer of overlapping, obscuring forms and then flattened back to one plane by the scanner, the works have a vitality and energy that isn't often associated with cut paper photocollage.

In these works, Smalley is testing the limits of modern photographic image construction in smart ways. Instead of falling into the trap of being satisfied with the capabilities of the ubiquitous digital environment, he has found a way to reintroduce the rough and hand-crafted back into the conversation. His abstractions combine contrasting elements of perfection and imperfection, never letting one side dominate the other.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced at $13000 each. At this early point in his career, Smalley's work has no secondary market history, so gallery retail is really the only option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Feature: L Magazine (here)
• Interview: Future Shipwreck (here)

 

Travess Smalley, Capture Physical Presence

Through June 1st

Higher Pictures

980 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10075

Image Object @Foxy Production

JTF (just the facts): A group show containing a total of 13 works by 4 artists/photographers, variously framed, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller back room. (Installation shots at right.)

The following artists/photographers are included in the show, with the number of works on display and image details listed after the names. No edition information was available on the checklist.

• Andrea Longacre-White: 3 archival inkjet prints, framed in white and unmatted, each 36x26, from 2012
• Travess Smalley: 3 digital c-prints, framed in white and unmatted, each 40x30
• Kate Steciw: 3 c-prints with mixed media and plexiglas, framed in oak and unmatted, each 40x30, from 2012; 1 sculpture (customized metal), 2012
• Artie Vierkant: 1 six-pass UV print on Sintra, unframed, 54x16, from 2012; 1 sculpture (IKEA Vilgot, IKEA Dignitet, screws), from 2012; 1 sculpture (IKEA Grundtal, North Face Etip gloves), from 2012

Comments/Context: We tend to hear the phrase "on trend" when it's used to judge the ins and outs of the seasonal variations in the fashion industry, but the truth is, we could just as easily apply it to the patterns and groupings found at the emerging edge of the art world. In our contemporary photography subculture, we might say that digital aesthetics are on trend this year, or process centrism, or the exploration of photography as archive. One cluster of activity that is undeniably on trend for 2012 is the continued objectification of photography. This well-edited show contains plenty of fresh examples of work from this burgeoning genre, where artists are leveraging layers of construction steps into finished works that play with three dimensionality.

Andrea Longacre-White's images are complex and interlocked, using meticulous stratified rephotography to build up textural monochrome abstractions (installation shot at right, top). Her works contain areas that alternate between the crisply sharp and the softly blurred or pixelated, paper layers ripped and cut into angular lines and geometric forms again and again, covering the narrow spectrum from black to white. I was impressed by both the conceptual sharpness and the elegant balance of these works, and I liked the small digital cursors that popped up in expected locations, confusing my ability to unpack the overall temporal order.

At first glance, Travis Smalley's all-over abstract works look like colorful swirled finger paints, but as you move in closer, they begin to have an unexpectedly undulating texture. This is when you realize that things are not as they seem. The works were made by putting modeling clay on the glass bed of a scanner, and the resulting flat images document the squishiness of the clay and the artist's left over smears and fingerprints (installation shot at right, second from top). It's a new twist on intermediated process, offering unexpected avenues for exploring fluid abstraction.

Kate Steciw's works are unabashedly digitally manipulated, taking garish stock photos in blazing lurid colors and bending and chopping them into busy angles and smooth curves, almost like marbled Italian papers, albeit with a harsh dizzying brightness (installation shot at right, second from bottom). Her images are then adorned with lines of colored tape, pink sponges, carpet remnants, silvery stickers, and chrome car parts stuck right on prints and frames, bringing them into the realm of collage or combine and adding texture and depth to her brash, knife-edged palette.

Finally, Artie Vierkant's pastel gradient object has perhaps traveled the farthest from photography, forgoing any camera based imagery at all for a dive into software (installation shot at right, bottom). This work is clean and machined to perfection, almost like a blurred Bauhaus photogram, reinterpreted in a 21st century aesthetic.

Overall, this show is an insightful sampler of some of the recent approaches being used to reconsider contemporary photography in object form. All the works play with conversion and transformation, starting with one visual idea and rendering it in an altered form, where the reconstruction process modifies the original in innovative ways. While we're clearly still in the first phase of this trend, the overall concept has certainly opened up some new, uncharted white space for photographers to investigate.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows:

• Andrea Longacre-White: $2500 each
• Travess Smalley: $1700 each
• Kate Steciw: $3000 each for the prints, $1800 for the sculpture
• Artie Vierkant: $4500 for the print, $2400 and $1600 for the sculptures

None of these artists/photographers has much if any secondary market history, so at this point, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors looking to follow up.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Andrea Longacre-White artist site (here)
• Travess Smalley artist site (here)
• Kate Steciw artist site (here)
• Artie Vierkant artist site (here)

Image Object

Through July 13th
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Foxy Production

623 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001