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Diane Arbus
Robert Miller Gallery
Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin
Matthew Marks Gallery
Philip Lorca di Corcia
Pace Wildenstein Gallery
By Nicollette Ramirez
Utilizing photography as their medium, artists in three different
shows this month — Diane Arbus, at Robert Miller; Philip
Lorca di Corcia at Pace wildenstein; Inez van Lamsweerde and
Vinoodh Matadinat Mathew Marks — revel in a style of
photography that captures the female form.
Other Faces Other Rooms at Robert Miller Gallery presents
a collection of rarely seen black and white photographs that
span the career of pioneering photographer Diane Arbus. The
spiritual mother of many contemporary photographers, we see
her influence on artists as diverse as Nan Goldin and Philip
Lorca di Corcia.
Her photograph, Stripper, Peaches Palmer, leaning on her
dressing table, Atlantic City, NJ, 1963 captures the character
of the woman, her personality and her persona, in what appear
to be candid of shots taken in her personal environment. Likewise,
Couple in bed under paper lantern, NYC 1966 enters the private
domain of a couple making love, as is evidenced by the man's
erection.
The juxtaposition of the private and public realms in Arbus’
photographs often produces an awkward tension. In Nuns and
their charges, Italy, 1952, the ambience of an empty room
and the monumental architectural elements of New York’s
mythic Penn Station are equally balanced by the intimacy of
a shot that captures a wild energy in the eyes of the young
girls.
In another example, Penelope Tree in her living room, 1963
shows a young girl, dressed demurely, standing in front of
a sofa with a chandelier over her head. This image, together
with Girl on a stoop with baby, NYC, 1962 seems to question
the naturalness verus the staged element of these works, suggesting
a narrative that is beautifully poignant, not only for its
contemporary imagery, but because it also harkens back to
images of the past, referencing paintings such as the ubiquitous
Virgin Mother and Child and the little girl in Velasquez's
The Maids of Honor.
Arbus, for all of her gritty realism, shared a fashion connection
with the artists at the Matthew Marks Gallery. She and her
husband, Allan Arbus, owned a fashion studio for some two
decades.
Matthew Marks Gallery presents the second installment from
a series of work by artists Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh
Matadin. Pioneers in retouched photos through digital means,
the Netherlands-based couple have distilled a style of photography
that is emotionally engaging, yet ethereal. The couple has
enjoyed much commercial success with their collaboration in
fashion. Moving between the worlds of art, fashion and design
is certainly not a new venture for artists. Andy Warhol straddled
art and design and the alchemy made something new; Pop Art.
The Now People, Part Two: Life On Earth presents the same
vibrant, and at times scary images of women that inform the
couple’s commercial work for fashion brands such as
Cesare Paciotto. From a wall of collaged, magazine size images,
the work moves on to a complex imagery of the "wild woman"
in large format silkscreen shots that incorporate metal elements
with the help of sculptor Eugene Van Lamsweerde, Inez's uncle.
The use of large scrap metal and trash, which carry a street
credibility in the form of graffiti and stickers, makes the
collaboration between these artists more earthy and fun.
Philip Lorca di Corcia brings a gritty element to his otherwise
staged, polished and sterile works at Pace Wildenstein Gallery.
But this hint of the streets is not the only thing Lorca di
Corcia has in common with Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh
Matadin. Dubbed Lucky Thirteen, this show's title incorporates
the same number as the number of new photographs in the Van
Lamsweerde and Matadin show at Matthew Marks Gallery.
Lorca di Corcia photographed strippers or "pole dancers"
in and around New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas in 2003
and 2004. The large format c-prints depict the women in the
center of the picture plane in various poses on the pole;
the images are at once beautiful, vulgar, vulnerable and provocative.
The effect of the stagecraft, shown in darkness under a light
that seems to come from the heavens, transforms the strippers
into living sculptures, both enticing and repulsive. The portraits
are self-titled; Juliet, Ms. Muse, Lola, Sin. With tattoos,
piercings and muscles that rival those of men, these gravity
defying creatures offer up mystifying portraits of themselves
that linger, hauntingly, in the viewer.
D. Arbus: thru 10/15. I.V. Lamsweerde and V. Matadin thru
10/22. P. L. di Corcia: thru 10/8
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Angela Valeria
Tribes Gallery
By Lily Faust
Installed on a clothesline in the gallery’s urban backyard,
Valeria’s A Bird in Flight is an Omen consists of white
linens, white undergarments, a white apron and a white nightshirt,
with large images of flying birds in blood red dye. The birds,
two roadrunners depicted on the sheet, chickadees on the pants,
finches and hawks on the other garments, are boldly painted,
with the red color fully defining the form, and, in certain
places, bleeding off the form to the edge of the fabric. The
juxtaposition of the white linen on a clothesline in the nondescript
backyard, coupled with the unexpected presence of the red
birds painted across the white items, produces a haunting
impression.
The work is a conflux of the personal and the political,
evoking memories of womanhood and resilience, struggle and
victory. Valeria, whose Italian grandmother hung out the “biancheria”
(the whites) on a clothesline, remembers days from her childhood
that she spent with her brother, running around the laundry,
creating moving images with her shadow. Referencing that vivid
and personal memory, she extends the bird motif into the political
terrain of gender and identity, implicit in the blood red
of the “stained” sheets. Held tautly in the upper
corners, the white linen sways in the wind, bringing to mind
banners of unsettling, conflicting forces, setting the stage
for struggle and violence. The installation also hints at
peace making, with the image of a single bird egg falling
into, or, depending on one’s perspective, out of the
apron pocket. The implied drama of the red birds set in flight
against the white linen suggests a metaphorical balance of
life and death. And, like so many birds traveling across the
sky, the iconography moves us to ponder unknown destinations,
rich with a visual poetry.
Through 10/31.
Maggie Taylor
Laurence Miller Gallery
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Maggie Taylor
Laurance Miller Gallery
ByJoel Simpson
Maggie Taylor's work sits squarely in the grand tradition
of altered photography, a practice that goes back to the late
Nineteenth Century. It has been famously explored by surrealist
photographers such as Man Ray, Raoul Ubac, Hans Bellmer, George
Hugnet and Maurice Tabard who utilized distortion, montage,
solarization and other darkroom techniques in the 1930s. Taylor’s
husband and former teacher, Jerry Uelsmann, is one of the
genre’s contemporary masters. As evidenced in this show,
Taylor has carved out a very particular niche for herself.
Although she supplements her imagery with her own photographs,
she relies mostly on the ubiquitous software, Adobe Photoshop®,
for the final result. Her style is unmistakable — as
alluring as it is puzzling — capturing a nostalgic atmosphere
of Victorian twilight, each image presenting a bizarre twist.
Her subjects are long gone people who had their portraits
taken by equally long departed pre-modern photographers. She
scans these portraits, then adds color, atmosphere, background,
and incongruous elements, such as insects, birds, and fish,
which catapult them into a dream world. These images compel
our attention, suggesting a symbolic meaning often just beyond
our grasp. For example, in Subject to Change, a bearded man
looks left as a denuded tree grows from his head; in Moth
Dancer, a pre-adolescent girl in shorts, ballet slippers,
a mask and wearing feathery moth antennae, is surrounded by
luna moths attached by ribbons to her waist; and in Twilight
Swim, a woman in a old-fashioned bathing cap stands hip deep
in water, adorned with gold-shining whitefish around her neck
and garlanded with seaweed, while a similar fish swims near
her with a shark fin strapped to its back, as four other shark
fins appear in the background, the darkening sky filled with
a hazy moon and bright stars. The style borders on that of
children’s book illustration; the visual language is
sentimental, whence their charm. The juxtapositions are incongruous
and the meanings enigmatic, hence their fascination.
Taylor studied photography at Yale, after majoring in philosophy,
but the Yale photo department was a temple of purism, valuing
the modernist aesthetic of the unaltered photographic image
as manifest in the classic documentary artists, such as Robert
Frank, Cartier-Bresson and Lee Friedlander. When Taylor showed
her carefully constructed montages, they were dismissed as
“not photography.
She went elsewhere to study, landing at the University of
Florida at Gainesville, into the receptive hands of master
montagist Jerry Uelsmann, who was her teacher before they
married.
A recurring theme throughout Taylor’s work is the ironic
contrast between the impassive expressions on the faces of
her 19th century models and the extraordinary things happening
to them. We know that with the long exposures made necessary
by the slow photographic media in the past, subjects were
told to relax their faces. A smile would have become a grimace
after five seconds. But the impression portraits from that
period give is that of suppressed emotions. And if it was
such a repressive age, what was really going on in their psyche?
Taylor has developed a visual vocabulary of colorful fish,
luna moths, morpho butterflies, rabbits, birds, mice, horses
and yellowed paper to interact with and frame her subjects,
suggesting an unconscious world. The subjects seem blissfully
unaware that their thoughts, “materialized” through
these animals and objects (and confirmed by Taylor’s
titles), make them seem rather ridiculous, revealing much
more than they seem to think.
The atmosphere Taylor evokes is charged with a mild magic.
It comes from a quiver of effects she uses in a variety of
ways: subtle vignetting, cracks in backgrounds (skies or walls),
selective soft focus, and most of all her color pallet. She
favors the orange-browns, sallow skin tones that seem aged
like the leaves of paper in many of her images, and the green-blue-purple
end of the spectrum, making the less common reds more conspicuous
eye-catchers. But most effective of all is her careful use
of saturation. In most of her photographs only one color is
saturated; the rest are muted. Sometimes the saturated color
covers only a small area, like a flower or small article of
clothing. Other times it blankets half the sky; other times
it occurs in an object — golden boxing gloves in Fighting
Man; a flame on an aged photograph in Burn — and in
a background element (the framing rust pattern in Fighting
Man, the background sky glow in Burn). This color elemem-dashnt
rewards the eye with a sensual pleasure that feels incongruous
in the quaint settings Taylor confects, thereby strangely
validating the bizarrerie of her creations. The effect is
most powerful when the saturated object or field is not the
main focus of attention, as for example the vertically striped
orange wastebasket in The Man with Too Much Time, which depicts
a man throwing paper airplanes (presumably before real ones
were invented), a very subtle effect.
The exhibition catalogue is published by the Adobe company,
under the rubric of a Photoshop Master Class. What? Taylor
is about to give her secrets away at the same time as she
displays her work? Actually, her Photoshop operations are
only very generally described, illustrating more about her
care in constructing each detail than the actual step-by-step
Photoshop procedure. But the catalogue is much more than that,
including chapters devoted to various photographers’
and critics’ appreciations of Taylor’s work, as
well as a generous amount of information on Taylor’s
background and development as an artist. The reproductions
capture the colors well, and there is an appropriate visual
leitmotif of colored threads throughout. The interviews with
Taylor herself reveal much more about how she arrives at her
images, collecting objects to scan that appeal to her, than
it does about those elusive deep meanings in her work. For
the latter, we have the work itself.
through 10/29.
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Yin Zhaoyang
Max Protetch Gallery
By Mary Hrbacek
Yin explores the power of iconic architectural and sculptural
monuments in large scale paintings that define historic political
eras. The role of myth in the shaping of a unified Chinese
social order is emphasized in works that express the fading
of memory, by the use of fading forms executed in soft, undefined
contours. This technique is reminiscent of German painter
Gerhard Richter. The monuments that shape the relatively recent
advent of the communist era are themselves subject to the
rigors of time and the degeneration of weather. From the period
of the dynasties to an age of collective utopia, memories
of these vanguard times are rapidly disappearing into the
past as yet another epoch is burgeoning in China today.
Several paintings of groups, all from the works entitled
Utopia I,II and III, depict soldiers working in concert to
achieve and celebrate their common objectives. In Plaza II,
the people are depicted on a tiny scale, all converging on
a monolithic white structure. These images seem to refer to
the strength that results from cooperative efforts in which
individual consciousness is submerged in the interests of
a unified goal. The idealized, Social Realist sculptures in
the Utopia series express an almost religious fervor that
depict bleakness and sacrifice through the use of gray stone
and uniform stylized figures. The painting, Mao Anyuan, depicts
the Chinese leader on one of his historic walks in the countryside,
where he is considered a religious deity or prophet. His direct
contact with the populace had a great emotional impact on
the young Chinese of his time.
Yin blends the past with the present, in addressing issues
of collective consciousness, history, and the fading of memory
in images of public squares and memorials that have served
to give substance to the myths that have unified Chinese societal
structure.
9/8 through 10/3
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Rebecca Holland
Moti Hasson Gallery
By Lily Faust
Leaning nonchalant against the gallery walls, Holland’s
narrow vertical panels stand seventy-eight inches tall. They
are made from poured Jolly-Rancher candy, lime green, with
medium size squares made of sugar, the color of watermelon-pink.
Further in, on the floor, we see jade-like chunks of green
candy, crushed and spread out within the neat perimeperimeters
of a rectangle. In a separate room, a white wall subtly shimmers
with light reflected off the minute crystals uniformly stuck
on its flat surface. After inquiry, we learn that these works
are formed by melted sugar, either applied directly onto the
wall, or formed into planks and sheets like hardened candy.
Exquisitely crafted, these geometric structures have an elegant
and deceptive presence. There is sense of beauty inherent
to their fragile existence. As objects hinged on impermanence,
they are mystifying and possibly worrisome. Assumptions previously
made about the make-up of the panels, that they are made of
glass, or of resin or of plexiglass, shift into a fascination
with the knowledge of their truly ephemeral nature as candy;
yes, this work is edible.
On an entirely different scale, two shelves at one end of
the gallery we find Holland’s most recent series, Pink
Debris and “Yellow Debris. Consisting of little blobs
of pink and yellow/green candy that form a ball around bits
of detritus that she picked off the streets, this series departs
conceptually and formally from the pristine geometry of the
earlier works in the show. Discarded items, such as a hairpin,
a toothpick (still in its wrapper), a rusty nail, a bottle
cap, a matchbook cover, and other tiny matter are recycled
into a jewel-like existence by being dipped in the sumptuous
colored candy. Like a beautifying project that refuses to
leave any object untouched, Holland encapsulates tiny bits
of material into an endearing hybrid version of itself and
a dab of artful candy.
At some point the dialectic between sugar as edible material
(sweet, crunchy, soluble) and sugar as artistic medium (crystalline,
ephemeral, shimmering, sensual, and sticky) becomes a point
of contemplation underscoring the work. The use of pure candy
in building immaculate panels that capture light is an idea
that could probably go further than these initial steps suggest.
Beyond their elegant appearance, the works point to rich associations
with ideas of sweetness, sensual pleasure and seduction.
Still, in the luscious transparency of thin planks of sugar
in lime green and twilight pink, the oddly delicious experience
of the color is tasted, oddly enough, right in the retina.
So much for a case of synesthesia; the stimulation of one
sense that elicits an experience in another.
Through 10/20.
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John Bell
Nary Manivong
(re) Defining Space
Mandarin Oriental Penthouse/ Time Warner Center
By Micheal MacInnis
Separating the dancer from the dance; content from context
and form from function can be tricky to say the least. At
what point does a party become an art happening? We’ve
got art fairs, and alternative art fairs and alternative art
spaces and then something else. Nu Skin cosmetics executive
Sandie Tillotson, championing her Force For Good Foundation
(www.forceforgood.org), had the idea last month, at the start
of the art season, to invite a gathering of art crowd insiders
to mingle amidst a cacophony of art, design and fashion creators
in her penthouse suite atop the newly anointed Mandarin Oriental
in New York.
The focal point of the posh, mini art event was a selection
of thirteen design orientated relief paintings by John Bell,
which resonated with the hyper-high-rise industrial architecture
of the surrounding space; at some eighty floors up, the new
Time Warner Center nearly rivals the old WTC towers for its
commanding presence in the sky. Although the work borrows
a bit too heavilly from Frank Stella, Bell manages to stop
short of producing knock-offs by connecting his work to a
different environment and referencing his own experiences.
Against this backdrop, fashion designer Nary Manivong introduced
a new collection of fall fashions, rounding out another evening
of art and fun in the new, gentler New York.
Ed Note: For more information please contact
Mary Fresques at 801.599.2087 or Dan scwartz at 212.947.4557
Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Contemporary Painting
and Drawing
The Whitney Museum of American Art
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Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds
in Contemporary Painting and Drawing
The Whitney Museum of American Art
By Jari Chevalier
Taken on its own terms, this exhibition of paintings and
drawings conjures a world of psychic surveillance. These are
not merely imagined worlds, but artistic renderings of clairvoyant
activity that hint at a deeper reality. But they are also
invented. And they are also tongue-in-cheek. This is a show
that both takes a stand and then doubles over.
A Kafkaesque wall drawing and text by Ben Marcus, Peterson’s
Forensics, introduces the show. Essentially a technical diagram
of a fictional machine with an absurd sidebar that reads like
a self-help manual authored by a psychotic, this work sets
the tone for what follows
Marcus’s work, among the most interesting in the show,
provides a textbook case of insanity masquerading as logic,
satirizing the global machinery of incoherence with its attenuating
laugh-out-loud moments amidst dark implications.
The show’s centerpiece is an installation room by Matthew
Ritchie, who made four paintings for the show, connected by
his signature black lattice wall drawings and a central 3-D
lattice-work viewing station of black iron.
Dubbed The Living Will, this work reads like a contemporary
American version of a Tibetan tanghka. A traditional tanghka’s
stacked and ordered immensities offer serenity in the face
of the inconceivable. But here, Ritchie’s eyes of consciousness
redoubled into infinity, and his Ever-living One, are torqued
and blown apart in a sea of nets and snakes. A swarming order,
that is too layered to depict, leaves us dazzled, unsettled,
and powerless. We are caught in the throes of something that
will swallow us before we’re finished having fun with
it.
Of the eight masters brought together for the show, Ati Maier
and Julie Mehretu, offer their all-over-you, all-at-once multiple
perspectives in very different scales. Maier packs heaven
and earth into an energetic space that explodes and zooms.
Flat antique comic book tones on her small paintings seem
to illustrate a world that is being destroyed by its own romantic
notions of achievement. We have the familiar symbols; the
skull and crossbones, the mushroom cloud.
Mehretu’s oversized architectures, arenas overpopulated
with comet-tail lines, flags and logos depict a game which
seems to operate by its own rules, apart from the player.
In her most recent work, Untitled (created for this show and
affixed directly to the wall), she has dispensed with the
architectural layers of grids. There is just the movement,
wind through the grass, and the depiction of white space.
This new work, nevertheless, depends on her earlier work for
its power.
Carroll Dunham and Terry Winters, the grand-daddies of the
group, offer mature works in their signature styles. Winters’
paintings are fields of vibrant energy, while narrative, typewritten
text by Ben Marcus adds a wry amnesiac intrigue to the drawings.
Dunham’s work gives us his idiosyncratic and tragicomic
world of war, absurd machismo, urban dwellings and madness.
The show’s metaphysical nadir is found in the menacing,
hallucinogenic visions of Steve DiBenedetto, dominated by
helicopters, ferris wheels, and octopi in El Greco colors
and lights. Disappearance, a masterful brown pencil drawing
dominated by an octopus, makes more of an impact through its
monochromatic simplicity.
The ubiquity of tentacles and snaky shapes, as well as whorls
and vortices in the work of most of these artists conveys
that their collective psychic radar enters the deep sea, the
entrails of the body, and outer space — all at once.
A uniting factor here is the quixotic whisper from the work
of all these artists, which undercuts the seriousness of the
artistic enterprise and conveys a sense of powerlessness for
all the bravado, as if the best of the best of contemporary
artists can do little more than duel with windmills.
through 10/9.
Soyeon Cho
A.I.R. Gallery
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Soyeon Cho
A.I.R. Gallery
By Gu H
Soyeon Cho rescues everyday objects — the humbler the
better — to lovingly construct breathtaking installations.
Twigs, plastic utensils and Q-tips; these banal objects which
usually are never given a second thought before being discarded
are invited by Ms. Cho to participate in wildly imaginative
and complex structures. They are not so much transformed (for
both the material and the method of putting the installations
together are completely transparent) as arranged, much like
arranging flowers. These once unlovely “flowers”
take on personalities in their new context.
Even in the gaudy glory of the larger pieces, because the
materials remain so recognizable, the installations are both
assertive and modest. Each has a completely different feel,
yet all share a poetic quality. Cinderella Castle, made from
hundreds of white plastic forks hot-glue gunned together,
suggests a bud-like form. Suspended from the ceiling by a
slender white chain that is allowed to pass through the sculpture
and onto the floor, the piece reads like an accidental, biological
release; there is something poignant in the celebration of
imperfection.
All of Ms. Cho’s works have an intimation of their
eventual fate, as agents of decay — returning to a state
of disregard and neglect. There is on one hand the idea that
art should be about the sublime, to aim towards a spiritual,
elevated state; then there is a mindset that embraces the
world as it is, even in its most banal elements. These works
manage to do both; they embrace the most humdrum of everyday
existence while saying something meaningful about the world.
through 10/9.
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