Eastern European adolescents stare out of Michal Chelbin’s staged yet intimate portrait photographs, seducing the viewer into uncomfortable, voyeuristic complicity with the camera. At once touching and disturbing, the series on view in this exhibition ranges from Jenya, Ukraine, 2005, wherein a teenager in a swimsuit leans suggestively against a car, to Nastya, Russia, 2007, a seemingly old-fashioned portrait of a girl sitting sweetly in a chair, her red hair neatly combed. Many of Chelbin’s subjects pose in isolated settings, which stirs the impulse to narrate—a desire quickly frustrated by the pictures’ irresolvable ambiguity. Xenia on the Playground, Russia, 2003, depicts a skinny, half-naked girl with rouged cheeks hanging from a rusty frame in front of a drab housing project, as if performing for some neighborhood boys who linger in the background.

Boys do not escape Chelbin’s sympathetic yet unrelenting scrutiny. They pose in homosocial scenes such as the shirtless Two Athletes, Ukraine, 2006, or Young Cadets, Russia, 2004, wherein eight uniformed adolescents stand in a light-dappled forest. Adults and parents are conspicuously absent from most of the series, although they occasionally take on uneasy starring roles such as in the black-and-white image Grandfather, Russia, 2003, which juxtaposes a made-up Lolita sprawled on the couch with an old man staring out from the foreground. In Angelina with her Father, Israel, 2005, an athletic but vulnerable-looking man holds his daughter in front of a swamp, poised as if offering her to the viewer. Legible as a gesture of either exploitation or redemption, the image encapsulates an emotional tension felt across the series.

— Lori Cole

Jordan Wolfson’s four-minute film untitled false document, 2008, commissioned by the Swiss Institute, begins with an attractive woman on the bow of a yacht, holding still-life photographs. She struggles to secure the papers’ edges, which are turned by the sea breeze. The film gestures to Bob Dylan’s video clip for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” in which the song’s transcribed lyrics slip into misspellings and incongruities. But other references accumulate, including allusions to the French New Wave and Surrealism, all of which, like the still-life images that improbably pair pumpkin and eggplant, pineapple and mushroom, are subtly dissonant with the viewer’s expectations. The film zooms out to reveal the scene as a video playing on a flat screen in the artist’s empty Brooklyn apartment. In unstable sync with the film, “Vicki” and “Fred” from Apple’s universal-computer-audio settings recite a text by Wolfson that connects the instability of authenticity to authorship: “All of this rolling together to support a system of the unmistakable unrecognizable. Like a good truth in the form of a lie. The lie being something original because it is existing on our inside and the truth being something unoriginal because we accept to hear it again and again and again.”

Wolfson has divided the space with cinder blocks and drywall into two chambers connected by French doors from his home, another red herring suggestive of subjectivity. One room contains the film, where Wolfson saves the Eiki 16-mm projector from sentimental interpretation by his self-reflexive discussion of the film’s making, as does the noise of the reels, which hum in competition with the audio track. The front room contains bleachers at its perimeter, as well as the muffled audio from the film. Too large and oppressively empty for the relation and exchange suggested by the seating arrangement, the space fills with allusion, impossibility, and, inevitably, emptiness.

— Alex Gartenfeld

In describing the transformative aspects of his iPhone camera, Rob Pruitt cites the familiar analogy of Muybridge's early photographs, which captured every second of a particular motion in order to convey a sense of continuity. For Pruitt, noted for project-based works that reference pop-cultural phenomena, this particular capacity of the trendy albeit pricey Apple device has had a similar, transformative impact on the way he views the world around him. This exhibition, “iPhotos,” attempts to convince the viewer of these revolutionary aspects with an installation that literally overwhelms, a physical manifestation of what the artist describes as his personal experience.

“IPhotos” seems as much a state-of-the-union address on photography, however, as it does on technology. Muybridge references aside, Pruitt’s subject matter ranges from high cultural (Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World, 1866, makes several notable appearances) to quotidian (repeated images of events that might seem insignificant to those without access to the artist’s personal experience). The contrast of high and low is only the most superficial of the exhibition’s connections, however; on further reflection, the viewer is forced to consider both the qualitative and quantitative importance of the anecdotal snapshot and the implications of attaching personal and cultural value to the Courbet as opposed to, for instance, multiple shots of a pan of brownies Pruitt presumably enjoyed a few weeks back. If most of the images on view matter primarily to Pruitt, is their value to us sentimental, aesthetic, or otherwise? The nature of the installation, in which photographs appear floor to ceiling—in some instances serially—throughout several rooms, enhances their immediacy, as well as the ambiguity of the relationship between each and to the artist himself. This mass physicality illuminates the developing relationship between technology, disposable images, and the acutely personal experiences they are designed to depict.

— Britany Salsbury

One can barely think of Christian Marclay without thinking about music (hip-hop and punk rock come to mind first), as for over thirty years he has created smart visual and conceptual works that play against the ephemeral nature of sound and the fragility of its media. Although Marclay has tended toward deconstruction, destruction, intervention, and manipulation, the new works in this exhibition appear to be threnodies for two outmoded media: cyanotypes and cassette tapes. The gallery’s largest room features nine large cyanotype prints that the artist produced this year at the GraphicStudio at the University of South Florida, Tampa, a printing atelier known for its experimentation and, accordingly, an impressive roster of visiting artists. Smashed cassettes line the bottom of these works, with hanging and interweaving twisty tangles of ribbon swathing, stretching over, and sweeping across the silhouetted surface. Each of these works is aptly titled Memento, 2008, a reference to their look—party streamers left hanging after a rowdy night—and time-based production, as well as the near obsolescence of both media. Fans of International Klein Blue, Prussian blue, or just plain periwinkle take note: The oceanic backdrops of these prints are drop-dead gorgeous. While deep, gut-wrenching blues impart an atmospheric moodiness and melancholy to the exhibition, color isn’t the only captivating element here. What surprises is the fact that these works, though photographs, have a painterly feel and therefore seesaw back and forth between gestural abstraction and dry conceptualism.

— Lauren O'Neill-Butler