February 26 to April 30, 2016
523 West 24 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 243-0200

Many of Ellsworth Kelly’s photographs, shown here in an exhibition of 31 gelatin silver prints, ingeniously feature the kind of geometric shapes that distinguish the late artist’s painting and sculpture: the triangle, trapezoid, rhombus, rectangle, curve and plank. Several prints are suggestive of the artist’s virtuosic plant drawings. The prints were produced under Kelly’s supervision just months before his death in 2015, and they were shot between 1950 to 1982. Over this long period, a singular attention to abstract elements in the everyday world remained constant whether the location was overseas or the US. In an essay from 1991 reprinted for the exhibition catalog, Kelly noted,

Two things interest me in particular; one is the way a frame — a window, an aperture — changes what you see. You can focus on things differently and frame them differently; your vision becomes fragmented. The other aspect is stereoptics — the fact that we have two eyes, and that we see things differently out of each. It’s very mysterious, but we tend to take that aspect of vision for granted.

Although the artist wasn’t referring to photography per se in this comment, his references to aperture, framing, and optics do relate to special things the camera can do, as well as to human vision. But no matter the tools or techniques, Kelly sought to study the world by cultivating his powers of observation. With regard to photography, he remarked,

Photography is for me a way of seeing things from another angle. I like the idea of the interplay of two or three dimensions. My photographs are simply records of my vision, how I see things. My ideas develop from seeing, not from photographs.

Kelly often noticed physical shapes in proximity to their shadows, or to voids. He made inventive use of camera optics and framing devices to translate ephemeral situations into enduring compositions. For example, the weathered, closed barn doors at the left of Barn, Southampton appear to be painted white, while the matching doors at right were folded open when the image was taken, so that the absence of light inside the barn printed black in the photo. Viewed across a wheat field, the barn’s middle gray tones offset this pair of white and black rectangles under a triangular roof. It may take a moment to register the roof and rectangles as abstract shapes within the scenery. But once you do, you’ve got your Ellsworth Kelly goggles on straight. As Kelly himself remarked: “Photography is about seeing in three dimensions and trying to bring it into two dimensions in a way that recalls the third. The process takes place in the mind.”

This comment is also pertinent to Doorway Shadow, Spencertown. A rhombus-shaped shadow falls from peaked boards onto a plywood sheet, where knots and grain gleam as if hand-polished. Their indexical texture is at odds with the flat black angle that dives to center. Seeing the world through the mind’s eye of Kelly’s camera offers an opportunity to understand a great artist’s work more fully.

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March 12 to April 18, 2015
210 Tenth Avenue, 6th Floor (between 24th and 25th streets)
New York City, 212 691 6565

In her resplendent second solo show with Edward Thorp, of paintings made in the last two years, Judith Simonian demonstrates a genius for color, texture, and the exploration of spatial conundrums. Twenty canvases, worked in acrylic, range in size from a mere eight by ten inches to as much as six foot by five with subject matter that cycles between categories of comparable breadth. There are what I’d describe as optical-illusion still lifes, domestic interiors, travel theme — on earth and in space, and nature studies. It’s a roomy, mixed bag of themes.

In Snow Cone (2014), a good-sized work at 46 x 64 inches, figure-ground elements add up to the representational suggestion of a cake wedge — an illusion enhanced by a bright triangle of frosting at image center, behind which a brightly hued, roughly textured yellow background seems to throw the cake’s decorated layers, and the lower third of the painting, into shadow. The pedestal of a cake stand can also be discerned, where its elliptical silver platter appears to hover over a tabletop. This metaphor of the cake wedge simultaneously alludes to “slicing” and “layers,” terms familiar to most anyone who works with imagery in the online environment. In the physical studio, Simonian often employs collage, in techniques where “slicing” and “layers” are quite literal.

Collage can be seen to contribute to the optical illusions of Fruit on Blue Table (2013). Both paintings, along with others such as In the Rapids and Red Fish Bowl, while accomplished works in themselves, come across as studies where the artist hones her craft for more ambitious undertakings, such, for instance, as Patio Lounge Chairs (2014), a gorgeous tour-de-force of abstraction and illusion. A deep pool where goldfish swim dominates the foreground, while the eponymous chairs, in brilliant vermillion, there are almost hidden behind a black umbrella, which decently shields from view a couple enjoying the tropical ambience of a summer afternoon. The evocation of plant life, a humid atmosphere, and a cooling body of water all induce the viewer to read much more into the painter’s marks than might actually be there.

“Fleshy Pink Room” (2014) is a six-foot-high painting whose lighting effects, layering, and pink and green tones bring to my mind the mannerist master Jacopo Pontormo. A forbidding foreground barrier keeps us from walking straight in; instead, we must find a way to float over a lime green tongue in its groove on our way to the room’s pink flesh, as it basks in the glow of a far blue entryway. This painting exemplifies Simonian’s well-justified reputation as an intuitive painter. To quote from the press release, the artist enjoys turning “colorful scraps of trash” into pictorial compositions that approach “near collapse.” In fact, the bombardment of sensory data that we continuously take in from the world would collapse us without the mind’s capacity to knit it together. Simonian’s paintings suggest the contradictory resilience and fallibility of this process. In so doing, they knit luscious pictorial fields that tease cognition, along with the senses.

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The tranquil, beguilingly lovely Evans Pond, approximately 80 miles south of New York City in Camden County, New Jersey, is surrounded by a tangle of woods. It is also the subject of an ongoing, multipart visual exploration by Deborah Garwood, an artist, critic and scholar who grew up nearby. She has studied its history, learning that, in colonial times, it was a millpond established by Quakers in co-existence with the Lenni-Lenapes, a Native American tribal people; in the 19th Century, it was a “station” on the Underground Railroad; and now, it is a public parkland. Photographing it in different seasons and lights, she has captured Evans Pond’s range of guises and moods, a range that inevitably reflects her own. It is a prolonged portrait, a visual biography, the afterimage of which is a self-portrait, a visual autobiography, an alter ego. Investigated with singular dedication—she has photographed it one weekend a month for 10 to 12 months of the year every year since she initiated the project–it is part historical record, part environmental report and land survey, and part poetics of place, a meditation on the cycles of life, on what is lost and what remains. In Evans Pond: A Long-Term Study of a Single Place, Ms. Garwood taps a naturalist vein in American culture, one that is deeply attuned to landscape, to memories of wilderness altered by the encroachments of industrialization and (sub)urbanization, to the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman (Camden’s most famous resident)) and William Carlos Williams (who made a New Jersey river immortal).

Ms. Garwood’s suites of modest sized images, 2,3, or 4 to a suite, are most often gelatin silver prints although some are in color. Taken with a variety of cameras–from view cameras to box to digital—and using different films and processes, Ms. Garwood has created an archive of the medium, synopsizing its aesthetic and technological history. The pictures themselves vary, the clear brilliant colors of digital prints in contrast to the dreamy tonalities of the black and whites, the former very much of the present, the others moodier, some in soft focus and less crisply perfect, evoking 19th-century scenes. It is a survey in real time but also a survey of the history of the medium, the pond seen through the camera eye of different periods. The point of view can be close-up or more panoramic, looking upward or straight-on, creating in its sequencing an immersive experience. These still photographs, formatted as diptychs and three or four-part sequences are installed so that the resultant rhythm creates a cinematic sense of movement, the progression slowed, stopped for a moment by the shift from one image to another, by the intervals between images, the site deconstructed and reconstructed. The effect is like that of a film in slow motion, one with a pause button handy.

Evans Pond, as a project, seems straightforward, factual but, ultimately, it is much more quixotic, a kind of fine, understated madness, an act of private possession as well as public presentation—which is what makes it particularly gripping. Who photographs a pond for 12 years? In Ms. Garwood’s narrative, we are quietly offered a place, unpeopled because people come and go although their presence is implicit. With that, we are also offered reassurance as well as Ms. Garwood’s stubborn belief in some imagined beauty, in the invincible, renewable earth.

Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic

Slideshow: click thumbnails to activate:

The post Time out of Mind: On Deborah Garwood’s Evans Pond appeared first on artcritical.

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Deborah Garwood, Blake Gopnik and Alexi Worth joined David Cohen to review Tacita Dean at Marian Goodman Gallery, Jenny Holzer at the Whitney Museum, Stephen Prina at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, and Peter Saul at David Nolan Gallery.

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Deborah Garwood, Kim Levin, and Elena Sorokina joined David Cohen to review The Whitney Biennial

We must apologize for the fact that the recording of this event failed

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Lance Esplund, Deborah Garwood, and Raphael Rubinstein joined David Cohen to review Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Elizabeth Murray at the Museum of Modern Art, Jeremy Blake at Feigen Contemporary and Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed at Zach Feuer.

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Your current project is called Evans Pond, Sequential Photographs, a Long-term Study. Where is Evans Pond?

It’s about 80 miles south of New York, in New Jersey. The pond is part of the Cooper River system, which flows from Pennsylvania into southern New Jersey.

Is it a familiar landscape? How did you settle on this particular place?

I grew up in Haddonfield, New Jersey, so I’m familiar with this landscape from my childhood.

You started your career as a sculptor. How did you move into photography?

I was drawn to sculpture because it’s multi-dimensional and deals with the environment the way we encounter it. It’s in the world. In the 1970s, when I was studying, sculptors were working with movement, installation and performance, and it offered a more expanded concept of artmaking to me than painting did at that time. My early work was installation-oriented.

The sculptors I admired in the 60s and 70s were using photography as an extension of their practice. Robert Smithson was wandering around New Jersey and photographing. His photographic work was an early reference for me, and also the photographic work of Sol LeWitt and Dan Graham and Gordon Matta-Clark.

So you were inspired by sculptor’s photographs in particular?

Yes. There was a sense of continuum between their sculpture and their photography. Their photographs used multi-format shots that were relational. They presented images in grids and matrixes, and thought of the ensemble as “documentary”—as opposed to the “painterly” aesthetic of single photographs. Strangely, no one discussed Gordon Matta-Clark’s photographs as photographs until very recently. Sometime in the late 1990s the Guggenheim finally created the category of “conceptual photography” for work of this type. Now it fits in beautifully with other efforts to multiply and deconstruct the camera’s image.

So how did you finally move into photography, and into this project?

At first, I simply wanted to photograph my own sculpture in order to take charge of its representation. Soon after, I began to study the history of photography, particularly the photography of sculpture. I took a lot of photographs of statuary at that time in order to help my technique with the camera and the darkroom. Then, in 1991, I got permission to research the photographic archives at the Rodin Museum in Paris. The fascinating thing is that the archives are organized by sculpture, not by photographer. All the photographs of “The Burghers of Callais”, taken by different photographers with all different cameras, are in one box. Suddenly I saw photography as a flexible and heterodox medium. And that experience became one of my influences for working in multiple formats, multiple cameras, and multiple media.

Later, I began looking at landscape photographs, and I noticed that most photographers develop a signature style with a signature camera. They go all around the world, photographing different places, briefly, with this one camera, or one technique. And I thought, what if I brought a bunch of different cameras to the same place, and studied it over time?

What kinds of cameras are you using?

Vintage Rollei, Mamiya, Diana, Holga; antique Kodak black box and folding cameras; forgotten brands like Coronet, Lubitel, Genos, Box Tengor, all of which take medium format film. I’ve also used some 35 mm cameras, such as the Nikon F, a 1970s point-and-shoot Kodak Ektanar, and a tiny 1940’s Russian field camera. In 2000 I also started using a Canon Elph digital camera. So I’m studying the media as well as the place.

Using all these cameras, I have become aware of how photographic syntax has changed over time, with technology. I love that a camera that was made to photograph the world in 1910 can be used to take a picture today. The culture has changed, taste has changed, and production values have changed, but the machine will still work.

You’ve used a variety of films, and an incredible variety of printing techniques as well.

I have. I’ve mostly made gelatin silver prints, but I’ve also done a significant amount of color work in slides, transparencies, and some c-prints. I have some straight from the lab RC prints. I’ve printed on clear acetate and duratrans as well as all different kinds of paper, even old paper and paper that’s been fogged. I have digital prints made on the computer, too.

“Evans Pond, Dec. 24, 1999” [above] resulted from darkroom manipulation. I made it from two low-density negatives. One was an underexposed infrared negative—black and white infrared film reverses some dark tomes to white. For the other negative, I photographed the textured, painted surface of a painting I had made, and underdeveloped the film so only the brushstrokes showed on the film. When I sandwiched the two negatives in the enlarger, the result was this image with a ghostly, painting-like surface.  I used a warm-toned paper and a selenium bath for this image and it split the color range into grays and mauves. This image is entirely artificial and has a mood I want sometimes.

This project is about ways of observing a single place using many different cameras, formats, films, and techniques. The qualities of observation or the limits of the different tools you’re using are an issue for this project. You’re not providing a definitive portrait of this place so much as exploring what can be observed with these different pieces of equipment. What have you discovered as a result of your explorations?

I couldn’t predict how the project would develop when I began it in 1997. The rules that I made were that I would visit the pond regularly and build up an archive of images. I wanted the project to be documentary, conceptual and aesthetic, romantic and rigorous.

One thing I have learned is that even with this surfeit of description, the forest is extremely elusive. The only way to know a place is to go there and walk around in it. But of course it keeps changing! So, in order to focus my attention more on any changes in the forest—seasonal or otherwise–I ended up going to a few specific places again and again. Originally, I had been organizing the images in chronological order, but now I have them organized by site.

“Evans Pond, March 13, 2004” [triptych, above] is a piece from what I call Site 1, at the edge of the pond. These three images form a broken panorama. I photographed them originally so the frames abut each other, but I’ve presented them here as an incomplete panorama that your eye completes.

So this is a single piece, meant to be seen in a particular way, as an incomplete panorama?

This is one piece that I put together in this way. When you have several images in a row, and they relate to each other, it’s called parallel perspective. This is a concept from Chinese scroll painting. The idea is that the viewer passes along parallel to the scene, rather that going toward the vanishing point, as in Renaissance perspective. I like parallel perspective because it’s kinesthetic and embodies the viewer. This is one way of dealing with the camera’s limitations.

Are the camera’s limitations also our limitations? We add to what we see, to the way we see things.

There’s an involuntary response where your eye wants to connect the images, but it can’t, because there’s always this separation. Intuitively, we know that we can connect the whole scene, if only we could overlap the images. There’s a sense of time in these intervals.

That makes me think of music.

When I was growing up, I played music as much as I made art. When you read music, you think of intervals, measures, time and phrasing. All of that has influenced me. When I started making photographs, it always made sense to me to take more than one picture. I’ve always put them in groups, in sequences and phrases. One note doesn’t make sense by itself, and neither does a single image.

Another way I’ve used multiple images to form one piece is the digital print, “Evans Pond, April 16. 2005,” also of Site 1, that I stitched together from several frames [top of article.] My camera lets me knit together overlapping frames, so instead of the eye putting them together, the software knitted this broken image back together. The irregular shape of the photograph that results is a chance effect of the software that I can’t predict. I could crop off the irregular edges, but I always turn that function off in the camera, and I don’t crop the image afterwards, either.

Why?

The original shape of a photograph comes from the lens, which comes from the telescope. It’s round. The convention of cropping that roundness off happened fairly early, because people wanted the photograph to mimic painting’s rectilinear format. The circle shape that the lens makes is bigger than what we see on the negative, because it’s already been cropped inside the camera. Information is lost. This software reminds us that the rectangular shape of the photograph is only a convention, and we see that the boundary of the photograph is elastic. I adapted this idea of the flexible frame from Yve Lomax, a British photographer. She used collage and photography to release the image from the constraints of the frame, and the constraints of time.

You’re thinking a lot about time in your work. Your project is unfolding over time, and you also consider how the viewer might experience an image over time. And the concept of time itself has changed dramatically over the past century.

There’s a weird hybrid of empirical, scientific time and the psychological sense of time in photography, and I have been reading and thinking about that. I’ve read Proust, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze on Bergson. I’ve thought about Einstein’s theory of relativity, and how all these ideas about time begin to dovetail in the digital era.

Do you consider how attitudes towards nature have changed over time? Nature used to be scary and awesome. Now it’s like a fragile baby. We’re animals, we’re part of nature. But we’re apart from it, and have the power to alter it in negative ways.

This project didn’t start out as an environmental commentary at all, but as I notice changes in the landscape over time, the more this project seems to move in that direction.The Natural Contract is a book that came out in the 1990s by Michel Serres, a French philosopher. He saw that humanity was becoming another massive force on the earth, and predicted that the earth would eventually react to our collective force with its own tremendous, earthly energy. He refers to a print by Goya, in which two men are fighting in the mud. We wonder which one will win. But in fact, he suggests that maybe the earth will swallow them both before either one of them wins.

Are you interested in other photographers whose work addresses the environment in contemporary ways?

Michael Ashkin has done a photographic project on superfund sites, bravely going into these really toxic sites. And David Meisel has flown over ruined lakes that used to be beautiful and lush and are now wastelands. At first, we look at his prints as aesthetic images, even abstract images, but they are not just that. The work of Ashkin and Meisel might be called sublime. My project is a counterpoint to that approach. I’m a pedestrian in a local, familiar environment, and I’m documenting it over time. The drama quotient is low, but the stakes are equally high.

Talk to me about presentation. Your work will be shown at the Hamon Art Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 2006.

I work so hard on the surface of the print, I’d like them to be seen without glass. Prints seem embalmed to me when they’re under mats or glass. And when you go through the mounting process, something is lost. I’ve always loved just looking through prints in boxes, and handling them. Some of my images are unique prints, but I think most could be presented as display prints, as proofs, or sacrificial prints, without glass, with the editions made separately.

You also write about art. Talk about how your writing informs your art. Not every artist writes about art, after all.

I write to learn more about an artist or an exhibition, so my critical writing has a personal, research purpose. At the same time, I want to serve the public by making contemporary art more accessible. Early in my career, I worked as a guard at Dia, and I was struck by how mystified the public was by the work in front of them. I’ve found that my ability to read work as an artist is valuable, and writing is a way to share it. Finally, I’ve been in New York a long time now. I’ve developed a point of view on the contemporary art scene here. My writing is another way to participate in the art world, besides making art myself.

Is there any aspect of photography, any film, any camera, any paper or printing technique that you have not explored in this project?

Definitely! More color photography techniques await, and I’m looking forward to making larger digital prints.

Have you given yourself a time limit for this project?

I haven’t. It seems to reach a limit from time to time, and then I keep going deeper. I’m always glad I did. As long as I have a new way to go with the project, I will keep going.

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