Organized by Jake Palmert and Nolan Simon
June 23 to July 29, 2016
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 8634

Art dealer Jake Palmert and painter Nolan Simon, both from a thriving Midwest art scene, have put together a group show this July that is worth a stroll over to Marlborough Chelsea. Called simply “Landscapes,” its uncomplicated title implies, misleadingly as it turns out, a conventional look at a conventional genre.

The key sentence in a densely formulated curatorial statement doubling as a press release explains how they sought to “…tease out the developments in visual culture that have so fundamentally realigned relations between the artist and the art work, art’s content to its audience, and the art-world to society at large.” Despite the somewhat muddled argument that follows this sweeping outline, Palmert and Simon’s choices for the exhibition were certainly adventurous, offering juxtapositions highlighting the many intriguing dilemmas facing those concerned not just with landscape, but with any basic genre’s survivability in a whirlpool of media-soaked contemporary art.

The theme I gathered from the selection was how much and how permanent are the changes to the landscape genre that are hinted at in the show. What effect can radical change have on a genre that has been both flexible and consistent for several centuries? For instance, a stark and cold vision of the Himalayas called View of Nepal (2010), by photo-realist founding father Richard Estes, hangs next to a pair of untitled and clearly kitschy forest scenes that Ull Hohn created in the 1990s as an overtly ironic take on the Bob Ross painting method. Placing Hohn’s jarring cultural critique beside Estes’s subtle dissociation from traditional realism reinvigorates an early judgment that Estes was primarily concerned with the media properties of the photographic image.

Palmert and Simon characterize this aspect of Estes’s work as “National Geographic.” But does their media metaphor explain Estes’s only motivation? It’s worth noting that Estes’s recent canvases remain unpopulated, carrying over a feature of his work that dates back to his often depopulated views of upper Broadway in the late 1960s. Could it be that his figureless sensibility, which has deep roots in 19^th century American landscape painting, led him to the naturally barren landscapes at the Earth’s poles? And if so, is this not a development one might associate with a conventional landscape approach, seeking views to match a sensibility?

How often such questions arise in “Landscapes” is a function of the curators’ having admirably avoided the easier path of choosing exclusively from artists dedicated to painting’s realignment (their term, not mine) and wisely including less radical examples of the genre. Rackstraw Downes’s Presidio: In the Sand Hills Looking West with ATV Tracks & Cell Tower (2012) fits the show’s thesis to the extent that it is a view of a somewhat industrialized location. However, the expansive and near greedy absorption of a site that has long been Downes’s métier, is also one of the older and more sustaining tropes of landscape painting. It is no surprise to me that his feeling for landscape as open space is unmatched in this show.

The conceptual touchstone of the exhibition is Simon’s own work, of which there are three examples around the gallery. They range from blatantly illustrative of the idea of a “…discourse on truth as a distorted image of itself,” as in Unisex Medium (2016), to New Location (2016) where Simon is at his best, offering an interior looking out onto a courtyard with the upper windows revealing a partial view of the walls surrounding the space, while the lower windows replace the courtyard with a shepherd and a flock of sheep surrounded by green mountains. Why he chose May in Mount Carmel, Texas (2016) as his third entry is difficult to assess. It is as unpretentious a landscape as one can imagine, though its unadventurous color and brush handling exemplify Simon’s stated determination to keep the viewer’s focus on idea over execution.

A few notable inclusions seem, with respect to the exhibition’s thesis, neutral at best. An aptly seasonal watercolor called Summer (1913) lets John Marin hold the line on landscape as a concentrated study of nature; John Miller’s Untitled (1984) Fauvist inspired waterfall is both lively and benignly distant from its subject; and FLAME’s beach scene is vaguely Picasso-like acrobats (or perhaps Dali-like self-immolating hulks). All three strive to complete the landscape context that serves as a counterpoint to the more radical entries. FLAME, possibly a reference to the high-end video editing program of the same name, serves here as a moniker for a collaboration between multi-media artists Taslima Ahmed and Manuel Gnam, whose computer graphic vision, though technically exotic, maintains a conventional sense of space.

I read Sylvia Pilmack Mangold’s Untitled (yellow painting) (1977) as a provisional work that ended up in a strange place. Cropped with masking tape, perhaps as an adjustment to a reconsideration of its original idea, the outer canvas received several shades of yellow before the artist either gave up on it or found its unfinished look appealing. The latter is more likely, as Mangold actually completed a series of similar canvases in the mid-1970s.

Alex Katz’s North 2 (2015) could be construed as a view from the artist’s studio. It has that sense of the rediscovery of an overly familiar sight. With its blank wall punctured by windows, uniform in appearance but for one, it echoes the sunlit cheerlessness of Edward Hopper’s city views. Moreover, hinting at the poetry of old age — looking to the cold north (could Estes be doing the same thing?) — it brings a poignant human vulnerability to the show’s otherwise cerebral orientation.

Paintings by several artists in the show suffer from not having enough examples available to provide more than a glimpse of each artist’s unique conceptual framework. Assuming these frameworks were the essential element for their inclusion in the show, their sparse representation inadvertently pointed to the weakness of their individual pieces. These include Keith Mayerson, Paul Thek and Mary Ann Aitken. In contemplating Aitken’s painterly riffs on billboards, Thek’s watercolors, and Mayerson’s Grand Canyon (2016), it became obvious that each needed a fuller representation of their self-defined contexts.

John Kelsey’s four watercolors are focused on landscapes surrounding politically charged institutional buildings, including an Apple Data Center in North Carolina, an NSA building in Utah, the VMWare Data Center in Washington State, and an unidentified Google facility. As a side note, Google’s undisclosed location infers that Kelsey feels Google to be most ubiquitously threating of the lot — a consistent position considering the show’s focus on media imagery. As watercolors they are nothing special, but the artist’s allegiance to disaffection, expressed in his mounting and framing each piece on a cool aluminum sheet, comes through loud and clear.

Mathew Cerletty’s Almost Done (2015), a witty rendering of a lawn mower’s progress across a carpet-smooth hillside, makes for quite a contrast to Jeanette Mundt’s Heroin: Cape Cod, USA paintings, made this year. Underscoring a grim subject — the paintings were inspired by the HBO documentary of the same name — each canvas offers a somber bluish New England landscape, some with narrow strokes of white scattered across the surface in a manner similar to Van Gogh’s attempts at painting rain. In an exhibition bent on addressing painting and media imagery, Mundt’s landscapes are a perfect fit. How they address the disturbing subject of drug addiction is less clear.

Marring an otherwise thoughtful selection is the seemingly transparent decision to include a work by radical feminist Betty Tompkins. Though an argument can be made for a nude in a landscape context — Titian, Giorgione, Joan Semmel, Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) — Tompkins’s uncompromising Cunt Painting #9 (2008) is fiercely feminist, and in this exhibition shows just how stubbornly her work resists attempts to transpose its intensity to a disinterested environment.

Considering that the exhibition was limited for the most part to Marlborough’s holdings, I thought the show managed to address its subject broadly and with imagination. Painting’s current struggles with a welcome rebirth of subject matter is the story of the decade, and how this story unfolds, specifically how the merging of media imagery with fundamental genres like landscape resolves itself, will likely remain the heart of the narrative.

The post The World Outside: “Landscapes” at Marlborough Chelsea appeared first on artcritical.

February 25 to April 2, 2016
724 5th Avenue, 4th Floor
New York City, 212 755 2828

What does it mean to paint representationally? For a Photorealist, it means a point-by-point recapitulation: the fixed, dispassionate vantage point of a camera. For a more tradition-minded painter, it involves a weighting of masses and details, an eliding of some elements and emphasizing of others: in short, a process of limitless characterization. Such a painting can end up anywhere on the spectrum of complexity, from bare minimalism to baroque embellishment. But a convincing traditional representation depends most of all on making elements count — on a disposition of forms that gives weight to masses, tension to gestures, and a resolving energy to detail.

Lois Dodd, as her admirers know, is a painter who makes things count. For over six decades, she has presented unassuming subjects — typically her garden and interior scenes — in singularly taut compositions animated by circumstances of time, light, and point of view.

Her latest exhibition at Alexandre, titled “Night and Day,” reveals that at age 89 she still isn’t missing a step. Among a series of night-time urban window views, 15 Night Windows (2016) stands out for the somber glow of its dark hues: the inky, cool mass of a building close to one side — more a looming essence than a dimensional object — and the barely lighter, warmer façade beyond, with spacious blue-violets of sky above. All these elements feel fully colorful even though occupying only a tiny range of extreme darks. Setting off their spacious depths, the crisp horizontal and vertical crosspieces of a window bisect the image. As a concept, the painting intrigues, but thanks to Dodd’s weighting with color, it takes on a sensuous mystery.

Most paintings depict daytime scenes, and in these, too, color is always a factor. Cherry Blossoms + Gray Sky (2015), a study of tree trunks, seems at a glance monochromatic. But one soon senses tiny shifts of color in the trunks, as they wend with occasional, slight bends from panel bottom to top. Strings of tiny white and green dots waft across the panel, poignantly measuring out the trunks’ rise.

The natural beauty of Dodd’s subjects often acquire an obtuse edge. In Apple Tree through Barn Window, September (2015), for example, an askew window sash angles rudely across a window view of flamboyant orange-reds and greens, as if to deny any foothold to the merely picturesque.

Occasionally — as in the large canvas Night House with Lit Window (2012) — colors tend to fill, rather than amplify, the dynamics of the drawing. But throughout the exhibition one repeatedly comes across odd moments made compelling: the grid of variously clouded panes in “Steamed Window” (1980) that progress around the canvas like images on a photographer’s contact sheet; the spindly, flowering plants, as gawky as teen-agers, crowding the center of Jerusalem Artichokes, September (2015); the lone flash of pink in Pink Towel + Chicken House, June (2015), suspended from a clothesline by two tiny corners — themselves framed, above and below, by a mounding bush and the racing outline of a shed.

In such paintings we experience not the charm of the picturesque, but the confluence of two sovereign forces: nature, and color-forms on a canvas. It’s tempting to think of Dodd’s as their intermediary, both mischievous match-maker and dauntless midwife. It’s a tall order, when you think about it. But isn’t that the lot of the artist? The possibilities for characterization are limitless.

The post As Agile As Ever: Lois Dodd at Alexandre appeared first on artcritical.

October 10, 2015 to January 10, 2016
1219 SW Park Avenue (at SW Madison Street)
Portland, OR, 503 226 2811

“Cézanne’s was not a canvas, it was a landscape.”
-Frantz Jourdain

I recently went to the Portland Art Museum to look at “Seeing Nature,” a survey of “landscape masterworks” from the Paul Allen Family Collection. Passing through the Paradise: Fallen Fruit imbroglio at Portland Art Museum’s entrance makes this exhibition an even more pleasurable destination. The former’s tormented, though enjoyable, curatorial bent is a commentary on modern culture and our inheritance of its public spaces, through various paintings and sculptures of PAM’s permanent collection spanning several eras, abutted sans-info or contextual sequencing. Less the mélange than a remix, though extremely understated, sculptures are clustered on a plinth at center gallery, while paintings hang in crushes along the walls. A good thing about this concept is that it takes canonized works and forces the viewer to answer for themselves the question, “Why is this major?” It’s a contemporary idea not short on tradition. That it’s jumbled up isn’t a reproach, it’s the point of the piece — to raise questions by making a work of art out of past works. But “Seeing Nature”’s M.O. is something much simpler though still nuanced, and visiting both exhibitions makes for two different museum experiences. One way of presenting a collection isn’t more valuable than the other, but what happened during my visit made certain institutional implements seem worthy of their subsisting charms.

The Paul Allen Family collection, some of whose 39 works are seen here in public for the first time, is composed of quite a few French Impressionist works and an impressive, wide array of other works from the last 500 years. The exhibition’s supreme appeal seems to be its intention to give the sensory experience of landscape. However old-hat this may seem to be, it works. The show’s sequencing is uncomplicated, with ample wall space between works, allowing space for longer looking. Three large galleries hold the paintings with central seating in each for tired feet, long visits, Instagramming, etc., and the the walls are affixed with artworks in unexpected and titillating curations.

The first room features the glorified French works including five by Monet, as well as Paul Signac’s Morning Calm, Concarneau, Opus 219 (Larghetto) (1891) with a musical connection in Pointillist fragmentation, like musical notes coming together to form a number. Signac’s fragments, like other of the experimentally adventuresome paintings in this show, fully allow the viewer to put the optical illusion of sailboats off the coast of Brittany together retinally and with their imagination. Seeing Gustav Klimt’s experimental 1903 oil painting of a birch forest at Attersee, Birch Forest, I can’t help but laugh, picturing Klimt painting among the birches, holding up his opera glasses to distort and augment the sights. The close-up view of birches juxtaposed with spacial illusion of the rest of the forest is dizzying and totally pleasurable.

Still, the same question can be asked: Why are these paintings famous and why should I care? My favorite of the show, Henri Le Sidaner’s Serenade at Venice (1907), immediately sent me into a state of reverie and welled my eyes, which also happened when I saw Degas’ Café Singer (1879) in Chicago. What causes such a reaction? Light (paint) forming the impression of life (the singer’s red lips, the sun, or in Le Sidaner’s case, low nocturnal flameglow). Le Sidaner, “delicious rhapsodist of night,” replicates the feeling of gloaming at night by way of painted paper lanterns, the luxury of sightseeing, and music made possible by subtle chiaroscuro (without Baroque melodrama) in his 1905 painting of gondoliers on a Venetian lagoon.

One of the other two rooms is full of Modernist favorites like O’Keefe, Ruscha, Richter, Hockney, Magritte, and Ernst, many of which are stretches when it comes to landscape, raising the question: what is a landscape? Take for instance Ed Ruscha’s Premium Oil (1965), a painting that brings the landscape to its viewer in its absence. What Ruscha presents here is a large silhouetted building, with the landscape a mere suggestion left to the viewer’s imagination. One would be remiss to not mention David Hockney’s massive panoramic stunner in oil, The Grand Canyon (1998), a veritable contemporary Fauve take on the natural monument. It’s by turns flat, illusionistic, cartoony, and naturalistic.

The third room features the older of the paintings, with artworks that document a return to classical themes, myths, and architecture. Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 1625 series, “The Five Senses,” involves the landscape combined with portraiture and still life, while Venice occupies the canvases of Turner, Canaletto, Manet, and Moran.

Returning to the first room to leave, I happened on Joan Kirsch, an art historian and docent giving a public tour. Knowing her wide frame of reference and clear, entertaining eloquence, I couldn’t miss the chance to listen in. Joan’s one of a kind who’s been around a while. She once told me that she used to rollerskate to the Met and then roll around the galleries looking at all the art. She and her group were at Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1888-90). I learned things that contextualized an already thrilling painting in ways that maybe wouldn’t happen without the mediated viewing of the guided tour. In Cézanne, this kind of viewing is absolutely helpful.

Knowing that Cézanne has probably influenced every painter since his death doesn’t lessen his works’ challenging aspects. In this and the hundreds of Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings Cézanne made, the natural landscape looks unnatural, larger than life, not at all like it does in situ. Cézanne’s structured, strange brush strokes (owing their slant to his left-handedness) reflect the painter’s emotional baggage, to paraphrase Joan. He painted his interpretation — what he wanted you to see, not what’s necessarily there. All this led to a conversation about why so much of the work in this exhibition was satisfying, and why we call this kind of work “great.” Cézanne (one of the first experimental painters of the Modern era), like so many of the artists in this exhibition, only wanted to give you part of the picture and so he left the rest for the viewer to discern or keep wondering about. “When you’re in a forest,” Joan explained, “you don’t even need to see the whole tiger. If you see his tail, you run.”

“Seeing Nature” will also travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and will conclude at the Seattle Art Museum in 2017.

The post 500 Years of Earth: A Survey of Landscapes at the Portland Art Museum appeared first on artcritical.

February 26 through April 4, 2015
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 755 2828

57th Street has seen its share of contemporary art galleries shrink to a mere handful in recent years. Significant among the still-flourishing few is the modestly sized Alexandre Gallery, tucked away on the 13th floor of the Fuller Building. This month Alexandre offers a roomful of small panels demonstrating Lois Dodd’s gift for visual epiphany and, in the small anteroom near the entrance, a pair of portraits facing each other on opposite walls by Maine artist Brett Bigbee. Though clearly distinct from one another, these two painters demonstrate the range and the vitality of perceptual painting, a branch of the artform imprudently sidelined by our major museums these days in favor of a tiresome abstraction. If you find yourself seeking relief from MoMA’s trend-groping “Forever Now,” this exhibition should be your first stop.

Dodd has been at her peak for so long now that her reputation is all but settled, waiting only for transfer from an oral history among fellow artists to a more secure documentation in New York’s art institutions of record. This current grouping includes variations on themes she has improvised on for decades: landscapes, windows, sunsets, moonrises and iconoclastic flower studies. Of particular interest is Reflected Light on Brick Wall, December (2014), consisting of a window’s sunlit outline projected on white brick, including the silhouette of a house plant apparently sitting on the window’s sill. What’s unusual here is a carefully penciled grid, revealing in uncharacteristically dense detail the outline of each brick — hundreds of them. This elaborate drawing is then set back by means of deftly painted transparent layers of subtle color contrasts, ultimately reducing the effect of the drawing to a minor yet essential role. A risky move in consideration of the minimal painterly style she is known for, it recalls Mondrian’s late but youthful experiments with colored masking tape. Perhaps self-challenge, not posturing is the better route to continued relevance.

In paint handling Bigbee could not be more different. One may be tempted to assert that his work follows in the tradition of Grant Wood, but there are so many other traditions that could be mentioned — French Neoclassicism, Late Gothic — almost any style that keeps a hard edge running along meticulously modelled shapes may be said to share an affinity with these two paintings. The presence of this distinct sensibility in any era — examples seem to crop up in most periods — calls for recognition that Bigbee, like his precursors, is his own man and that his work ought to be assessed on its own terms. For what distinguishes a Wood from an Ingres, or an Ingres from a Van Eyck, aside from obvious historical dissociation, is the sensibility that surfaces through each practitioner’s devotion to their shared sense of heightened illusion. Left, then, to compare the two paintings to each other, it should be noted that Bigbee completes a very small number of canvases each year. Each of his paintings is in some measure a world unto itself.

Of the two canvases in this exhibition, Josie Over Time (2011-15) and Maxine (2012-13), I found the latter more compelling, largely because it seems unfinished, or perhaps spontaneously aborted. By this I mean that in its current state, which may indeed be complete (one assumes so, as it represents exactly half the exhibition) it appears as if the artist saw something worth preserving and decided to leave it as is, a move that raises intriguing questions about spontaneity that would otherwise seem counterintuitive considering the fastidious labor this painting style requires.

The glow that emanates from the skin of the sitters in both pictures (as opposed to a glow projected on the skin, like most pictures) is a product of delicate construction, but in Maxine it seems to have been halted before the cool underpainting could be brought to a fuller and warmer tone. Unlike the finish of its counterpart, which includes a fully realized landscape, Maxine’s flat and darkened background only emphasizes the ephemeral fog of her presence. Her eyes outlined in a pronounced scarlet, as if painted in preparation for the warmer flesh tones to follow, appear in their current state slightly separate from her graying cheeks and forehead, as if some inner discomfort has freed itself from her body. This ghostly pallor is further heightened by the bright red garment strap that ends in a casual tie over her right shoulder, supporting the attitude implied in her ambiguous, if not slightly resentful, stare.

The preeminent aspect of this style of painting is evident in how each artist’s methods dissolve into their pictures’ carefully overlaid membranes, obliterating brush marks, erasing any traces of labor and refining color to flawless modulations that in a superficial reading end up creating either a mesmerizing realism or an unearthly hyperrealism. And yet a careful study of Bigbee’s work in this exhibition suggests that the range of emotion separating these two paintings, especially if compared with the variety of human representation by painters of similar sensibility over the centuries, indicate that there is more to it than categorical realism. These two pictures ought to encourage us to reassess our use of the word “expression” as synonymous with sweeping, slashing brushwork.

The post Two Visions of Realist Painting: Lois Dodd and Brett Bigbee appeared first on artcritical.

b. 1924, Brooklyn, NY; d. 2014, Manhattan, NY

Tribute by Thomas Nozkowski, 2014

Review by Franklin Einspruch, 2011

Review by Hearne Pardee, 2009

The Review Panel, with David Cohen, James Gardner, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr, 2008

Review by Maureen Mullarkey, 2005

More information on the artist can be found at Tibor de Nagy

Full index of listings for “Jane Freilicher” at artcritical

The post Jane Freilicher at artcritical appeared first on artcritical.

In the beginning was the Word; but after that came a whole lot of little tiny carefully cut-out-and-collaged pictures. Josh Dorman’s work, and his most recent cycle of paintings/collages in his solo exhibition, “Whorled” at Ryan Lee, seem initially to be about dainty narratives set up on some kind of floating Pollock’s Toy Theatre stage, but his fantasies are more about moving words: typologies, taxonomies and nuance. Because of this, Dorman has bridged the gap between the Word made flesh — via the excised bits of numerous catalogs, dictionaries and manuals — and evolution in all its forms: natural evolution, as well as industrial and architectural, though perhaps the point here is there is little difference. In the background of all the paintings (save one) Dorman has laminated the monotonous and regular, yet ever-changing pattern of a player piano roll, a visual metaphor of the flexible inclusiveness of his visual framework.

Scouring antique books to appropriate their diagrams and illustrations, Dorman tricks the viewer into thinking that his work is about images, but the proof is in the democratic way in which he weighs the individual collaged entities in expansive, landscape-format paintings, such as Memento Mori (all 2014). The collage depicts a wide variety of apes and monkeys frolic on the shores of a lake with a similarly variegated collection of architectural diagrams. There is the all around equanimity of man and nature that marks a Bierstadt-like sensibility, despite the gross-disparities if scale and rendering techniques.

In Memento Mori there are also machine parts such as cams and cogs. The unit within these paintings is not the organism, but the cut-out. Much like a Joseph Cornell box, Dorman creates his drama via an assortment of things. The artist reminds us of the origin of his search by including several entries from a dictionary: “myrrh,” “myrtle,” “myself,” “mysterious.” Past all the smoke and mirrors of feathers, antlers, gears and spots, all of this mess neatly falls into the space between A and Z — the fundamental logic of why everything is there in the first place is irrefutable. Though he flirts between the almighty and Darwin, Dorman plays it safe as a something of a technocrat, or perhaps an encyclopédiste.

He is definitely partial to images of the natural world and this is echoed in the themes of the pieces Unintelligible Design and Natural Selection. But there is a latent criticism of the human need to find a narrative direction in scientific law: the climax, so to speak, of Unitelligible Design is a de-railed locomotive in mid-air over a body of water. The march forward, which begins on the left side of the painting with a horse, ends in a steam-powered disaster. Similarly, in Memento Mori an otherwise innocent-looking primate is munching on the bloody wing of an unfortunate avian. The images are meticulously sliced from the yellowed pages of old books and prints — they are inky and decisive, crosshatched and precisely detailed in the way that only an etching can be. Dorman places his cutouts with fantastical natural backgrounds or dystopian urban/industrial nightmares of elevated bridges and walkways — within a stage set too wild to be real, ironically enough his characters/actors take on an increased individuality, often heightened with touches of color.

Book of Hours is the most didactic and ambitious of the pieces, where Dorman posits a narrative on par with his method. The triptych relies heavily on a series of painting tropes to get a message across of the inevitability of ruin; anthropocentric or otherwise. The first panel depicts a Hicks-like Peaceable Kingdom; in the middle, he pauses for breath in an inky and etched purgatory of a Piranesian Carceri; and comes to rest with a Pieter Breughel-like hell. Predictability is not an issue here; as a painter, Dorman has free access to use many of the time-worn images that his predecessors have used again and again, but is more concerned with contemporary questions of what these tropes mean for us now, and do they still mean at all? More poignant is the video piece Sometimes We Find a Broken Cup. As with Book of Hours it has a message, but similar to several of the collages, it moves in a circular motion, presenting good and bad within the context of the natural world where such moral and aesthetic judgments do not apply. It bears a lovely similarity to Tacita Dean’s gorgeous, nihilistic 2010 film The Friar’s Doodle, and in fact, paired with Dorman’s folded Chinese book A Clawfoot Lamp, the video shows his thoughtful drawing technique to great advantage.

In the end, Dorman’s message seems to be both anarchic and deeply rational, much like the expanse of ideology he encompasses in the work. The paintings are chaotic; streams of illustrations and diagrams act as stand-ins for a series of historical and art historical pantomimes, but there is such a profusion of actors that it almost seems the director has lost control of his set. The joy in looking at the works is getting lost in the detail — but as with evolution itself, the detail is so multitudinous that missing links are hard to find and it can all seem very haphazard and miraculous even. But here is where the methodology brings comfort even if it doesn’t make sense of the disorder (which it does not). Process at least allows the viewer some comfort — Dorman’s alliterative categorical practice reminds us that no matter what scene these actors are playing or how they overlap or distract from each other, they are merely taking a brief vacation from the pages from which they were liberated, and one merely needs to pull a book from the shelf, or google a few letters of their name in order to return them to their epistemological safe haven.

The post Nature Tries Again: Josh Dorman at Ryan Lee appeared first on artcritical.

To place Melanie Schiff in the context of a staid photographic genre would be counterproductive to the poetic space her work inhabits. In her first solo show at Kate Werble Gallery in New York City, “Run, Falls,” she draws us into conversation with the light of Los Angeles — where she has lived since 2008 — and the way it bounces off windows, bends around form and reflects to create layered compositions.

Schiff’s work began as colorful still lifes born of parenthetical youth culture and prosaic inanimate objects: moody mise-en-scène self-portraits with beer bottles in the aftermath of a party scene; half-nude women playing in wild landscapes; references to iconic musicians and albums within images; meditations on light hitting unremarkable objects. She was recognized for it with inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Her current work is a negotiation of the manmade set against the natural environment in a motif that calls for a visceral sense of place in reimagined quotidian scenes. In the aesthetic tradition of photographers like James Welling — whose work is among the canon of post-conceptual Los Angeles artists — Schiff continues to experiment with her medium, elevating the photograph beyond the frozen moment, using multiple or long exposures, unexpected juxtapositions, and as in earlier work, a play with light refraction and reflection. But whereas Welling uses tools like colored gels to alter space and create layers on top of the found environment, Schiff gently intervenes, adding texture with tangible objects (a textile, a window), or using technical processes like motion blur to further manipulate space. Sometimes Schiff doesn’t interfere at all; she allows light to trace its path and reference form. She only gives the viewer the most palpable subject of the image in her titles, freeing the mind to experiment with an underlying narrative syntax that she beckons through movement and enduring heliacal energy.

Throughout Schiff’s series, textiles and manmade materials commingle with textures of natural objects. Sometimes waterfalls are overlaid with pattern: a blanket becomes backdrop to weeds, and multiple exposures of a tattooed dancer are an energetic force in an otherwise rigid industrial architectural environment. Those latter pictures, Double Dancer and Dancer and Broom (all 2014) call to mind and provide a contrasting reference to Imogen Cunningham’s portraits of dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

On the farthest wall of the gallery, Threadbare I and Threadbare II set the tone for Schiff’s work. The images, which are some of the only color works in the exhibit, are a foray into the artist’s muse: Southern California’s harsh, warm light, which emanates through and peeks around worn oriental rugs. And perhaps by curatorial decision, environmental light is reflected a second time into the images: by light bouncing into the glass frames from the adjacent gallery door. While other reflections abound, smaller framed black-and-white landscapes spaced throughout the exhibit act as reference points, anchoring the series back to earth. There are works like Falls, which fits into the genre in a traditional sense, celebrating the watery life-force as portrait, and its counterpart, Triple Falls which is a suggestion of the same waterfall as an abstracted form approaching Cubism. There are less traditional landscapes too, like that of an image of a limb and its darkly clothed body written with light shining through a wicker chair. Where color shows up, it is overshadowed by the sun, which illuminates the composition, turning a monotone world into a spectrum myriad of hues.

A series orchestrated in a roving soliloquy that drifts between genres, Schiff makes work that’s an authentic representation of her social, geographic and solar environment. She plays with ubiquitous objects and asks us to consider their singular situational relevance, further eschewing boundaries set by formal elements of photography to reframe our expectations of narrative. In a time when a constant stream of imagery has the power to dilute conscious photographic practice and experimentation with process, Schiff’s work shines. Perhaps she gives us an escape, even if it’s simply in her own reflection; perhaps we just can’t avert our gaze from the sun.

The post Sun and Earth: Melanie Schiff at Kate Werble appeared first on artcritical.