September 6 – November 2, 2019
22 Cortland Alley, between White and Walker streets
New York City, andrewkreps.com

The Roe Ethridge exhibition, Sanctuary 2, that inaugurates Andrew Kreps new Tribeca gallery space sent me right back to that creepy, troubling feeling of nearly 20 years ago when I first experienced a photograph by this artist.

It was in 2000 at PS1’s Greater New York survey exhibition. The medium-sized, close-cropped color portrait of an attractive smiling young woman seemed initially unremarkable. But what was this lone photo doing in the context of such provocative young art? With her flawless skin, perfect hair and make-up, she could possibly be a model. Indeed, the photograph’s title was Ford Model Kathryn Neal (1999). Was it appropriation art, or a found rejected headshot? It was puzzling because although it seemed slickly banal like a commercial photo, there was something weird about it. Her expertly painted meticulously lipsticked crimson mouth was outsized, completely taking over the lower half of her face. There were dull reflections on her pupils that gave her eyes an unfocused quality, and the otherwise perfection of her look made her frozen smile seem increasingly, hideously, grimace-like, as if she had been produced in an android factory. What was the point here? And failing to be able to reach a conclusion, was that the point? Though we probably encounter hundreds of photographs per day, so few of them make us question their very purpose. I had never heard of the artist, but I remembered his fish eggs first name.

A challenging sense of disorientation links his uncanny disparate seeming photographs across years and motifs. Sanctuary 2 is a large show, extending to the scale of the works within it: Some of the 17 dye sublimation prints on aluminum extend six feet. So the fact that Ethridge has no signature style can be daunting. Even though the artist is a straight white, cis-male, these photographic works are genre fluid. It isn’t simply that Ethridge blurs the lines between art, fashion, and editorial but that he questions what constitutes the boundaries between those categories in the first place. There is, however, a precise subversion of the way we are accustomed to responding to photography.

Verrazano Bridge (2019), typically doesn’t seem particularly special at first, except for one detail that grows increasingly startling. In this almost, but not quite colorless, large photo (there is a little patch of green grass on the left and a small blue sign on the right), the bridge arcs distantly in from the left past a London plane tree, whose trunk and network of bare branches frame the picture. Every detail seems precisely, formally placed, from the way the end of the bridge disappears into a line of fog just past the midpoint, to the way the rectangle and arched hole of one of its towers is located almost in the center of the picture. Our view is from a sidewalk, separated from the water of the Narrows Strait by a parallel fence decorated with metal cutouts of sea creatures. The manufactured regularity of the fence bars stands in contrast to the organic expansion of tree branches at the top.

All this ordinarily might make for a nice but unremarkable picture, but right smack between branches and water, exactly even with the tower of the bridge, is a little dark pigeon in midflight. Not blurred but highly defined, it is so disconcerting because of its perfection and stillness both in clarity and placement. The picture is so formally calibrated it seems staged, or photoshopped. But no, the gallery informs us Ethridge simply waited, taking hundreds of photos, until that particular breathtakingly banal moment occurred.

In contrast to the too perfect natural moment photos (like the almost six-by-four foot White Duck (2014), whose titular occupant floats in a pond with exactingly even wavelets interrupting its reflection), are the ‘flawed beauty’ pieces such as Oslo Grace at Willets Point (2019). What appears to be an attractive young woman with a long dark braid wearing either a pink flight attendant’s uniform and hat or a high fashion outfit, poses on an orange plastic tarp next to a still life of fruits and a soda can, right in the muddiest possible rutted parking lot leading to CitiField, its bullpen gate in the background. There are large pools of stagnant water, parked cars, and a random guy in a red hat walking away in the distance.

Gender and racial subtexts abound in Ethridge works. The name Oslo Grace may be familiar as the famous trans, non-binary model, which makes the gender of the person posing suddenly an additional ambiguity. One of their hands is buried in the still life and the other seems to be holding a wineglass filled with, of course, rosé, adding to the litany of red accents in the photo. Everything except Oslo Grace is relentlessly squalid, and yet there they sit protected from the mud on this orange tarp in their pristine outfit sipping wine. Though Grace is the ostensible subject of the photo they are rather dwarfed by the landscape. Is this an outtake from a bizarre fashion or ad shoot? Despite the strangeness of the scene, what is disconcerting is our inability to classify the function of the photograph.

Or you could simply think of these disconnects as dryly humorous. There is the picture of detritus, wilted flower petals, a tennis ball and cigarette stub, which may for some recall Irving Penn’s still lives, and sure enough, from the brand emblazoned on the tennis ball, the title is, Penn and Wet Butt (2019). Or the one-liner of a photo of a half empty ketchup bottle, which at quick glance seems to have strands of French fries shooting in from the side, a view belied by the title, White Asparagus and Ketchup (2019).

There is almost always a telling detail, which serves to derail the meaning train of the photos. The almost six-foot-long Nathalie with Hot Dog and Flag, 2014, while straight out surreal (she is wearing a pea coat sitting on a pale, (Caucasian) flesh-colored personified hot dog squirting ketchup and mustard on its head in front of an American flag), really goes off the tracks when you notice the bruise on one of Nathalie’s alabaster naked legs. Chin resting on fist, wearing a crystal necklace, red hair flowing like the flag stripes, coat buttons echoing flag stars, Nathalie dangles her left hand strangely provocatively between her parted legs. The gallery informs us that, five years later, Nathalie is now Nathan, for whatever that tells us.

And when you see a photograph like Mehdi on a Motorcycle (2019), that is entirely shades of white, silver, and gray from the fresh-off-the-assembly-line motorcycle to the futuristic, blindingly white sneakers worn by the male model with long wavy hair, whose smooth brownish skin becomes the only thing of color in the photo, is there a racial subtext or is that just in my white head? Probably that deadpan ambiguity, like in most Ethridge photos, is exactly the idea.

What artworks have to say about the nature of artistic control and how that control can be used to affect a viewer’s perception, and how that relationship between control and perception creates the idea of representation seems to be Ethridge’s purpose. In art, representation becomes the way an artist can play with an unacknowledged series of viewer assumptions, and when viewers are forced to confront the unstable nature of their assumptions, as in Ethridge’s photographs, reality begins to come undone. Or just enough to get you to see with more sophisticated eyes.

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June 20 to September 13, 2015
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, 310 443 7000

“Perfect Likeness,” organized by veteran curator Russell Ferguson, is an intentioned and poignant show, with moments of profound tenderness. It was without question the best exhibition I’ve seen this year. It charts a renewed interest in photographic composition beginning in the 1970s, focusing in particular on the prolific photographers of Europe, Canada and the US working between the 1990s and 2000s. The works flow beautifully without the conventional curatorial buttresses of chronology or conspicuous thematic groupings. Ferguson’s deft arrangement sparkles with the subtle lyricism of a photographer’s series, allowing for moments of affection, irony, and fascination to unfold in front of the viewer.

Ferguson’s introductory wall text presses upon our current condition of image saturation, a point which interested me less than the mid-century break he posits between pictorialism and more candid, even journalistic, photography. The return to the “inauthentic” or arranged image is where “Perfect Likeness” finds its genesis. A gorgeous Robert Mapplethorpe work, Orchid (1982), could have opened the exhibition — it nearly perfectly characterizes the pictorial shift for which Ferguson argues. It was in 1982 that Mapplethorpe found his muse in female body builder Lisa Lyon, and his evocative image of a drooping orchid is anthropomorphized on film, displaying the same elegance, grace and emotion as his expertly staged corporeal forms. While Ferguson could have just as easily chosen a nude to mark Mapplethorpe’s predilection for choreographed imagery, I appreciate the fact that the flower, itself a site of sexual reproduction, was chosen. Roe Ethridge’s work Peas and Pickles (2014) shares a wall with the Mapplethorpe, and serves as both a formal counterpart and self-aware double entendre.

Christopher Williams’ Department of Water and Power General Office Building (Dedicated on June 1, 1965), from 1994, consists of two images taken at slightly different angles in the morning and evening. The subtle change produces vastly different effects: in the first, the building’s vertical lines are emphasized, while in the second it appears wider and more horizontal. One of the aims of “Perfect Likeness” seems to be the unification of painterly technique with that of photography. In Department, Williams draws upon the tradition of Monet, who depicted Rouen Cathedral dozens of times as a means of indicating the subtle distinctions in perception caused by shifting light and shadows.

This understanding of the photographic subject as malleable speaks to the issue of authenticity, a question which photographer Jeff Wall has spent a career examining (and debunking). Wall’s 2011 work, Boxing, features two white teenage boys sparring in what appears to be their childhood home — an elegant high-rise apartment with a Joseph Albers painting hung in the background. The art historian Michael Fried has made much of the quality of absorption present in Wall’s subjects; many times they perform a task or mundane action that suggests they are oblivious to the fact that they are being photographed. This absorptive quality squares with Wall’s pictorial aims: to create an image that appears candid but is in fact painstakingly composed. While two of Wall’s major large-format works are featured in the exhibition, it was his more diminutive 1993 piece Diagonal Composition that was the standout. The quotidian image of a kitchen sink glows with the help of a light box and was so perfect, so complete, and so personal, that I was nearly moved to tears.

Lucas Blalock’s Broken Composition, from 2011, consists of a double image of a broken light bulb. The wall text equates Blalock’s visible method of technical composition to the painter’s brushstroke. Here, both the picture and its subject are broken, adding another layer of ambiguity between the photo’s “truth” and inauthenticity. Stan Douglas’ Hastings Park was another standout in the show, a composite of a photo taken in 1955 and edited using Photoshop in 2008. For the photo, Douglas restages the 1955 scene at a Vancouver horse track using models in period clothing, creating an image composed of 30 separate snapshots.

Sharon Lockhart’s evocative 1997 series The Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team makes manifest a century-long photographic cliché: with her carefully arranged images Lockhart raises a mundane scene to the level of magnificence. By omitting the ball from the frame, the players appear to gaze up hopefully towards a higher power above. Thomas Ruff’s glossy portraits from the 1980s take up an equal amount of the exhibition’s real estate, though they’re nowhere near as compelling as Lockahart’s scenes. Ruff’s sitters look directly at the camera blankly, as though posing for an identification card. While the enormous format of these images is in itself seductive, they lose their visual punch when displayed in a series. In contrast, Elad Lassry’s Chocolate bars, Eggs, Milk (2013) is deliberately diminutive; apparently his subject of glossy chocolate and smooth eggs is plenty seductive, even at such a small scale.

The poignancy of the images on display is what left me thinking about “Perfect Likeness” weeks later. Catherine Opie’s 2012 portrait of the artist Lawrence Weiner raises him to the level of an old master, equal parts Rembrandt and Hans Holbein. However, Weiner’s soft body and gentle face lay bare a degree of tenderness on Opie’s part — she doesn’t revere Weiner, but cares for him. Equally affectionate were Gillian Wearing’s self portraits dressed as her mother and father from 2003. In these blown-up images, Wearing’s wig, glue, and mask are made visible, though not pronounced. This evidence of the characters’ construction points to the mother and father themselves as constructed figures, reproduced and reimagined in our own memories, often tainted with shades of nostalgia. Rather than recognizing “Perfect Likeness” on a register as broad as the shared human condition (as the wall text suggests), I understand it as a touching time capsule — one that, in my opinion, will mark the set of issues facing photographers today.

The post Curatorial Lyricism: “Perfect Likeness” at the Hammer appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 through October 19, 2013
71 Morton Street
New York City, 212-255-7872

The tendency among contemporary artists to move toward an interdisciplinary practice has never been greater. There appears to be an anxiety around the idea of executing works in a singular mode for fear of displaying a one-dimensional identity. Today, young artists, perhaps too primed by a business model of success, aspire to diversify their portfolios, become well-rounded innovators, and disseminate their developed and “branded” personal languages as far and wide as possible. However, there are of course, several strong exceptions to this rule, embodied in the work of individual artists, maintaining a steady focus within the general dialogue of specific media. For example, there is currently a movement in photography that advances the conversation around the medium, partially through a combination of conventional concern for formal and technical expertise with an unconventional approach to the conceptual aspect of image-making. Often cited members of this group include Michele Abeles, Anne Collier, Roe Ethridge, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, and Eileen Quinlan, each of whom have been featured in the past five iterations of the Museum of Modern Art’s “New Photography” exhibition series. These photographers each skew their chosen subject matter through an ostensibly “objective” lens.

Another photographer who seemingly fits into this widely expansive and now well-established niche is the Los Angeles-based Norwegian Torbjørn Rødland. Yet despite initial superficial signifiers, Rødland’s cryptic pictures are at once more direct and more off-kilter than many of his contemporaries. Specifically, in his coyly refined debut exhibition at Algus Greenspon, the artist displays an amalgamated aptitude for color and composition, but his uncanny awareness of narrative implications via stinted social associations is what gives these photographs their true allure and authority.

The first photograph one encounters is Narrative Stasis (Studio Kabuki) (2008-13), a deadpan shot of an unidentified person dressed in traditional kabuki accoutrement, their gender and ethnicity not quite clear. The work’s title serves as an ironically fitting introduction to this individual exhibition, as well as the artist’s overarching practice—the stylized story is stabilized through disparate chapters, each given their own peculiar swagger. This is also the first of many works reminiscent of film without being bound to film’s narrative powers. A smiling child in a brightly lit cage, a cropped body wrapped in sausage links like a mummy—absurd, juvenile ideas on paper, yet haunting as the stills of an imaginary movie. These cinematic images are evocative of Chris Marker and William Eggleston, whose work similarly begs the viewer to ask “who” and “why?” However, the surreal displacement of Rødland’s photographs keeps them at a distance from his forebears’ more documentary style of image-making.

In Rødland’s work, conception and perception of imagery is often manipulated with equal parts illusion and allusion, offering an unusual dramatic sense and blurring the line between prescription and coincidence, rarely seen in photography or art in general. This is aptly demonstrated in such conceivably unrelated works as Partner, Bathroom Tiles, The Corner, and Thorns. Partner (2008-13) contains two figures—a young Japanese girl awkwardly hugging a cheap Greek bust, their heads together, her biting her lip and looking away, acting the part of a cute stereotype as if she is endorsing something, except without much charisma or a slogan. Bathroom Tiles (2011-13), at first glance, appears to be an uncomfortably sexy photograph—red toe nail polish, wet feet, sterile environment—though upon closer inspection, the feet are not wet from water and soap lather, but rather some unspecified congealed substance, forcing the woman’s left foot’s toes to spread like Dr. Spock’s fingers, invoking a mood that is less seductive than perplexing. The Corner (2008-13) and Thorns (2011-13) are ghostly, black and white composite interior/exterior photos, giving new meaning to the phrase “mirror image.” These paused and poised moments speak to many of the placid yet unnerving 1970s images taken of forced entries, vandalized homes, or wrecked movie lots by the Los Angeles photographer John Divola. Like Divola’s investigations, Rødland here too attempts to hybridize painting, photography, and sculpture with a performative slant, as well as include still-life, landscape, and arguably portraiture all into one flat picture—a gesture one would think to be ridiculously futile and mildly pretentious, but as is the case with Divola it is jarring in it its instinctive, no frills poetics.

Throughout the exhibition, there is a proven consistency in both the lighting and staging of the subjects and the slick production (and post-production) of each of the images, mimicking both current art documentation and high-end advertising, namely fashion campaigns and product placement. This approach suggests a serious conceptual tone with a hint of satire. A work such as Twintailed Siren (2011-13), which depicts an empty Starbucks iced beverage cup precariously placed between a young woman’s smooth, clenched butt cheeks certainly would not look out of place in a DIS Magazine spread, but the surrounding works re-contextualize the starkness and cleverness of this gesture and supplement poignancy to the implicit erotic humor.

The final image of the exhibition, Black Ducati (2011-13) brims with subdued stimulation. Two models are centered in the frame, sitting on a black Ducati motorcycle—one is scantily clad, the other is nude; one is staring at the camera, the other is helmeted and looking down. Both seem to be unsure whether to be enticing, intimidating, or dejected—a savvy counterpoint to the stoic Kabuki portrait which prefaces the exhibition. As an artist, Rødland appears to take pleasure in the covert discomfort derived from slight alterations or deviations from recognizable information, and minor nuances and idiosyncrasies within the photographic presentation of said information. By maintaining a constant and restrained manner of working in contrast to the unfettered range of subject matter he presents, Rødland creates a surprising lag between recognition and cognition. In this way, he proves to not only be interested in the advancement of photography as a medium, but one could also argue, the advocating of a relationship shift in viewing and experiencing. Perhaps this notion alone doesn’t set him apart, but the resulting images do.

The post The New Image: Torbjørn Rødland at Algus Greenspon appeared first on artcritical.