Nathan Lyons’s exhibition, “Return Your Mind to Its Upright Position,” is thoughtfully curated and immaculately precise. It features a selection of photographic diptychs from his newest book (of the same name) as well as a section dedicated to his earlier work, which functions like a miniature retrospective and serves to more than adequately contextualize the photographer and his vision. What one learns, almost immediately, is that Lyons’ genius for establishing relationships between images is as strong as his ability to produce beautiful photographs.

Lyons shoots with a 35mm camera and makes five-by-seven-inch gelatin silver prints, which he mounts in pairs. In the last four decades he has not altered his presentation or methodology; nor has he greatly changed his subject matter. Through billboards, storefronts, graffiti, murals, memorials, placards and posters, his photographs speak to our collective desires, fears, anxieties, and ambitions. He may be the ultimate chronicler of our semiotic landscape, which has only grown increasingly manic.

Return Your Mind is Lyons’ fourth book and the images it contains date between 1998 and 2014. Politics, race, war, death, loss, love — these are the themes that thread through the book and exhibition, creating a narrative that sprawls as it unfolds. The state of one’s mind space seems to be Lyons’ overarching concern. His title phrase, Return Your Mind to Its Upright Position, which is drawn from an photograph of an Amtrak billboard, suggests that our brains have been in recline and that it’s time to wake them up, to ready them for some type of arrival. Closing out the series is a picture of a wall full of weathered posters, two of which read “Your Remedy…In Your Head.” Lyons is not making a diagnosis of mental illness; he’s appealing to our faculties of reason, imagination, and consideration.

There are rarely people in Lyons’ photographs, but there are often pictures of people. One particularly devastating instance pairs a Reebok advertisement of the rapper 50 Cent with a Crime Stoppers billboard of a 14-year-old boy sporting cornrows. In a huge font across the billboard, “who killed me?” This is placed in conjunction with a quote by the rapper, which is superimposed over a police fingerprint record, “Where I am from there is no Plan B. So, take advantage of today because tomorrow is not promised.” Lyons doesn’t get didactic; he doesn’t need too. The message is clear: the promise of tomorrow didn’t hold out for the murdered boy and Reebok will use cases like his to authenticate the messages it employs to sell product. Lyons’s pairing adds a poignant racial addendum; the teen and the rapper are both unsmiling African-Americans. Their plight is being turned into an advertising strategy.

When one becomes adept at perceiving degrees of interconnectedness, instances of serendipity occur with increasing frequency. The image that starts the book (and opens the exhibition) is of an open hand with the phrase, “Don’t Believe Your Eyes” printed over the palm in capital letters. It rubs up against an axiom of an earlier photographic era when images were understood to contain certain degrees of truthfulness. But it also addresses Lyons’s larger concern about one’s mind space. How and why we are inclined towards belief or disbelief has much to do with the condition of our minds. When the appearance of an evident truth is ruptured, it destabilizes the seesaw of trust and doubt, of illusion and reality. On an individual level, this can be severely distressing; expanded to a social phenomenon, it can be all together dangerous because the systems and processes that hold a society together end up woefully undermined.

Lyon’s seems to have seen this situation coming. The themes he’s followed over the last 16 years reached a breaking point during the run of his show a commonly accepted belief in the truth-value of images was irrevocably overthrown on national media. Millions watched a video that showed a man named Eric Garner being choked to death by police officers, none of whom were indicted for any wrongdoing. The discrepancy between what a society saw, and what the society believed became too great. Protesters all over the country took to the streets calling for fundamental changes to the justice system. One of the key methods for making their message known was to create signs. When the news cameras zoomed in on the protestors’ cardboard placards, the television screen momentarily looked like an image by Lyons. In the instant that life seemed to mimic art, reality appeared to swell with the danger inherent in Lyons’s vision: that images are interactive, their messages are malleable, and what they mean can be determined by how they are presented.

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April 18th to June 1st, 2013
535 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 627 3930

Keith Smith’s small, mostly monochrome images at Bruce Silverstein trigger a refreshing, animal sensation of quiet intrigue that’s rarely experienced in art nowadays—something that neither requires critical context nor resort to shock for immediate engagement.

The show of brings together, for the first time, a large group of works from Smith’s earliest years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with photographs that combine sewing, drawing and painting from 1960 to 1980. In 1978 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art survey of American Photography since 1960 alongside William Eggleston and Lee Friedlander; although his mixed-media, irreverent approach to photography does not follow the path of his then peers, his works maintains what the press release for that exhibition had exalted as the “pursuit of beauty, that formal integrity that pays homage to the dream of meaningful life”.

Smith is also known for over 200 artist’s books (one of which is on display in this exhibition) that employ the three-dimensionality of the book and a meticulously guided reading experience to incorporate the dimension of time. The individuality of each page competes with the book’s overall progression.  A comparable energy is found in this show of photographs. Smith works from highly selective source images, consisting mostly of ears, eyes, his home and men he loved but could not express his affection towards. Continuity zigzags through each image’s mixed media surface and throughout the show as the motifs are explored repeatedly over 40 years, each time in a different medium and under new circumstances.

Repetition, for Smith, is a tool for revelation rather than desensitization. In addition to illustrating a surge of movement, his gelatin prints of 8mm film expose a kinetic materiality that only becomes salient whilst their subjects are in motion: when isolated from the rest of the body, the hand in “Untitled” (1966) becomes a simple glove that encloses the human touch, a shifting outline activated by the detection of its surroundings. The unique hand drawn elements add urgency and scarcity, counteracting the comfort of print reproductions and establishing a permanent, conscious attachment between the image as a concept and its physical manifestation. The matrix of 30 pans with fried eggs in Bicycle Seats (1967) is created with print emulsion and subsequently colored by hand. The shadows and shifting handlebars almost form a rhythmic pattern which does not diminish the  sovereignty of each pan.

The most arresting works from the show are probably his depictions of men. Hand coloring, stitching and various printing techniques that supplement conventional photography extend the perceptual depth and presence of the dimension of time demonstrated by his book projects, allowing Smith to convey an incredibly intense, nuanced and ordered collection of sensations. A haunting negative (the chemical opposite of reality captured by photographs) of a man removing his shirt, Alan Undressing, (1978), arises through an image of a toned torso whose hand is halfway inserted behind his belt. Fantasy and reality intersect as Alan’s piercing white eyes and a rim of stitches reinforce the image’s tangibility. Another standout picture is 1971 for Book 22, (1971) a collage of a nude young man with surprised eyes curled up in bed. The right side of his body is a darker exposure of the overall image, furiously sewn on with bits of thread that resemble sharp spikes. They are like stitches that close up a rugged surgery wound, needle by needle, uniting Smith’s desires and the young man’s flesh as if they had always belonged together.

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Sharon Yaari has an uncanny capacity of imbuing straight, documentary, seemingly neutral urban scenes and landscapes with political, at times almost biblical potency—and that isn’t simply the condition of anything photographed in his native Israel.  At the same time, his images are permeated by stillness and quietude, untypical characteristics of that country.  Yaari is one of ten photographers nominated by the same number of curators (Suzanne Landau of the Israel Museum in his case) in this year’s Silverstein Annual at Bruce Silverstein on West 24th Street.

Bus Stop, (2007), two images offering front and rear shots of an inadvertent sculptural object in the form of a lonely, defiant concrete shelter in a rural setting impart ambivalent feelings that range from formalist delight to melancholy at the corruption of nature; nostalgia or a sense of foreboding at the very enterprise of settling a land

A pair of prints, meanwhile, of the same shot of a typical Tel Aviv apartment building, Jerusalem Blvd., (2009), one in color and the other in black and white, subtly insinuates narrative commentary on a lived-in utopia.  In black and white the print recalls the ubiquitous whitewash plastering of the Bauhaus “White City” while in the color version, what looked in black and white like mild decrepitude is clarified as a pattern decoration on the garden wall, adding ethnic particularization

In Road 6, (2011) a singular cloud on an otherwise blue sky set over a bleak stretch of road with its Arab and Israeli ancient towns of Ramla and Lod sign posted, recalls the line in Kings: “Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.” It’s an image that pits nature against development, modernity against timelessness, and aridness against some possibility of relief.  DAVID COHEN

The Silverstein Annual, Bruce Silverstein, January 14 to February 25, 2012 at 535 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, (212) 627-3930

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Show Hours

Thursday, March 17 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Friday, March 18 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, March 19 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Sunday, March 20 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Run, don’t walk to the Park Avenue Armory, for this weekend’s cornucopia of fine photography from around the world. A veritable feast for the eyes, ranging from incunabula to the latest experiments in photographic abstraction, this is a chance to see many prints that otherwise remain in the private domain.

If this year’s show feels more New York-centric than usual — with predominantly American gallery participation, and with Irving Penn, Diane Arbus or Nobuyoshi Araki all in the mix – there is nonetheless a striking Japanese flavor to the fair. Among galleries showcasingJapanese artists, there is a palpable effort to support Japan in its heartbreaking state.

Representing Japan directly is the Picture Photo Space Gallery from Osaka, with a selection of Araki’s Polaroid series artfully installed, along with astonishing work by Ayano Sudo, a young artist from Kobe. At first glance, her portrait series appears to be of 1970’s Manga-styled young guys and girls. Upon further examination, their gender bending ways become subtly apparent, with sparkles of glitter embedded into the prints. Ayano Sudo will be present at the gallery’s exhibition this weekend, dressed in her native garb, to answer any questions directly.

A few galleries are showing work that contends with, questions, and challenges the boundaries and relationship between painting and photography. Often, the results confound. Higher Pictures’ exhibition of work by Sam Falls and Claire Pentecost does just that. Sam Falls, a recent ICP-Bard MFA recipient, plays with and manipulates his photographs, so by the time he’s done, the viewer is not exactly sure what medium was used. Kim Bourus of Higher Pictures points out that it has now been ten to twelve years since artists began playing with Photoshop, and that this is the first generation of artists to integrate technology into their work successfully. Claire Pentecost documents her drawings on walls by photographing them using an 8 x 10 camera. She then makes palladium prints, referencing the early history of photography. On first regard, one must ask: are these drawings or photographs? Over at Steven Kasher Gallery, four portraits of an African-American family ask the same question.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery often shows beautiful, vintage Kertész prints at AIPAD, amongst many other classics. This year he also offers work by Shinichi Maruyama, and the series Kusho: gigantic photographs of paint in mid-air. For the diehard Andy Warhol fan, Deborah Bell Photographs offers Andy Warhol’s Street Series, a fascinating series of black and white photographs taken from 1981-1986 right here in New York City. Additionally, several works by the singular Gerard Petrus Fieret are included in her exhibition.

Saturday will also bring a slew of all-star panel discussions throughout the day, beginning with Photography Now: How Artists are Thinking Now, moderated by gallerist Julie Saul with Larry Fink, Shirin Neshat and Alec Soth. The last session of the day at 6 pm, AIPAD and the IPAD: New Technology and Photography, moderated by Barbara Pollack, focuses on the ramifications of new technology.

Tickets for the panel discussions are available in advance, at $10 per session, and are also available on-site
www.aipad.com/photoshow/new-york

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