Emigre

GALLERY 16
501 3rd St
December 18–January 29

View of “Emigre,” 2009.

Type design may be at the core of Emigre’s creative influence—they made computer typefaces hip and available—but in this twenty-five-year survey of their work, letterforms are elements with which to create. The type foundry, started by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko in 1984, the same year the Macintosh debuted, quickly came to enter publishing, music production, and visual art, tracking the pluralistic impulses that now course through contemporary culture. This exhibition’s selection of posters, press sheets, pasteups, audio and VHS cassettes, floppy disks, ephemera, and of course their eponymous magazine makes it clear that Emigre’s aesthetic—a fusion of Swiss design and DIY alterna-attitudes—was a product of time and place: The firm was founded in Berkeley, and its actions fed from the Bay Area’s active underground music and writing scenes and Silicon Valley’s tech innovations. (The gallery, it so happens, is across the street from the offices of Wired, a publication that cribbed from Emigre’s toolbox.)

The show offers a nonchronological history arranged salon-style, an idea enhanced by a 2009 series of large digital prints composed of remixed elements from past projects. These new pieces reveal the suppleness of VanderLans and Licko’s vision, as well as evolving output devices—the works seem brighter, crisper, and larger than other works here. Also included are pieces rooted in art and craft dialogues––a series of hypnotic, pattern-intensive abstractions composed of typeface fragments, Licko’s pottery, and VanderLans’s New Topographics–style color photographs of dusty western landscapes. These may not feel game changing, but they affirm that the Emigres are still playing.

— Glen Helfand

Shannon Ebner

ALTMAN SIEGEL
49 Geary Street, 4th Floor
January 7–February 13

Shannon Ebner, Leaf and Strike, 2009, chromogenic print, 8 x 12 3/8".

Shannon Ebner’s latest exhibition, “Signal Hill,” continues her semiotic adventures through photography. Here, Ebner transposes her willfully oblique hermeneutics to immaterial spaces, via a series of disparate gestures and ambiguous indices: her stark large-scale photographs, cement-block sculpture, and, most notably, photo-based wallpaper printed with the repeating phrase THE ECSTATICAL ALPHABET. Through these, she advances some familiar preoccupations, ostensibly the constructedness of language, its ephemeral materiality, and the slippage of meaning. Less overtly political than previous projects (such as the “Dead Democracy Letters” series, 2003–2005), this body of work initially unfolds as “poststructuralism for the virtual,” revisiting the sort of things one would have found in an 1980s critical-studies syllabus, jam-packed with ’70s tomes like S/Z (1970) and The Prison-House of Language (1975). But, of course, Ebner’s work requires a slow read, and her subtle games capitalize on the letter missing its mark.

A second look teases out a more personal dimension: a formal meditation on the legacy of conceptual photography, which, given the title, signals out Robert Adams, to be sure, but also the Bechers and the New Topographics. In this sense, rather than returning to slightly outmoded critical ground, the show engages an aesthetic legacy that’s propagated through certain lingering strategies, namely a theory-heavy criticality advanced through austerity and Soviet-era impassivity (with its echoes of Alphaville [1965]). Not quite a critique, Ebner’s is more an exploration of artistic genealogy, if also a somewhat melancholic acknowledgement of the possibilities foreclosed by her predecessors. Her approach is particularly evident in Leaf and Strike, 2009, a rather diminutive work tucked away unassumingly on the alphabet-covered wall. The piece pairs a photogram of an oak leaf with the icon for strike ( / ). Given the context, this simple juxtaposition can’t help but evoke the lost romance of the photographic landscape, once held as the pinnacle of the medium. The wistful gesture also provides an uncharacteristic break in Ebner’s otherwise deadpan iterations.

— Franklin Melendez

Travis Kent

SOFA
301 E. 33rd Street #7,
January 31–February 21

Travis Kent, Spheres, 2009, color photograph, 8 1/2 x 11".

Travis Kent’s recent photographs in “Hope You’re Well,” his first solo exhibition, are devoid of irony. Though many of the images approach cliché––the back of a head against a pristine rainbow, a hipster couple kissing in the trash-laden kitchen of a house party, a crocodile in a murky swamp––the artist has avoided the critical distance necessary to qualify his photographs as aloof commentaries on his subjects.

What is ironic, however, is that Kent achieves such earnestness through the spontaneity of his approach. Each photograph is a carefully composed snapshot. This may at first seem like a contradiction––snapshots are by definition made without forethought, taken in the moment to reflect the unself-consciousness of the subject, as well as of the photographer––but Kent has chosen his compositions carefully. When something interests him visually, he takes only one picture of it, often with a simple handheld camera. The photographs in this show represent a collection of imprints of lived experience for the artist, amassed over about a year.

Though his images are sincere, they are not without humor. Spheres, 2009, offers a store shelf of crystal balls arranged and tagged with prices. This composition of potential objects for some personal spirituality, arranged by size and color for easy consumption, should work to deflate the crystals’ uniqueness. Instead, it seems that only the owner of one of these objects can impart its value. The cliché in the exhibition’s title works in the same way: How many times have we said “Hope you’re well” when we have had nothing more creative to say? It is up to the speaker and the audience to maintain the vitality of such a phrase.

— Chelsea Weathers

Damián Ortega

THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, BOSTON
100 Northern Avenue
September 18–January 18

Damián Ortega, Resting Matter (Brazil), 2004, set of twenty digital prints, 11 x 14" each.

Damián Ortega practices a sculpture of ingenious dis-engineering and gentle explosions. In it, the laws of physics––motion and rest, gravity and centrifugal forces––function as compositional devices, tentatively cohering objects into an aesthetics of suspense. Energy coils out of these works: Witness the drunken spinning of Union-Separation, 2000; the tumbling, clattering release of falling bricks in Nine Types of Terrain, 2007; and the painfully slow unfurling of a golf ball’s insides in Liquid Center, 1997. Sometimes dynamism remains incipient, sucking in its breath and holding gravity at bay in piles of virtuosically balanced furniture, rotating oil barrels, or—most spectacularly, in 2002’s Cosmic Thing—a dissected classic VW Beetle whose insides are strewn through space. Even static materials, like inert heaps of bricks, are titled “Resting Matter,” as if to emphasize how the jumpy flux of constructive––and destructive––energy underpins all matter. In the gleefully twisted and tweaked forms of Ortega’s vitreous meditations on a Coke bottle in 120 Days, 2002, such dynamic processes of deformation are paraded before us.

Ortega’s interest in systems and in the dynamic energy of process art explains his affinity for the work of Robert Morris and Carl Andre. The former’s felt sculptures are recast as droopy saddles tattooed with the plans of utopian buildings. Sagging down from the ceiling, Skin, 2006–2007, playfully threads global strains of modernist architecture through the leathery filter of local economies of labor. In “Resting Matter,” a series of photographs from 2004, it is Andre’s trademark bricks that Ortega transforms from generic building blocks into culturally specific products of Mexico and Brazil, just as he unravels Andre’s orderly, generic grid with the idiosyncratic slump of individuals’ brick heaps. Both works tie labor, materials, and process to the specificities of place, leaving as universal only the cosmic state of deferral that seems to accompany the prospect of home renovations––the ostensible reason for massing these bricks outside people’s homes.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

Taro Shinoda

ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM
280 The Fenway
November 5–January 31

Taro Shinoda, Lunar Reflection Transmission Technique, 2007–2009, wooden platform, fabric, loudspeakers, video. Installation view.

Taro Shinoda’s video installation Lunar Reflection Transmission Technique, 2007–2009, rests on a seemingly hokey premise: the ubiquitous, universal presence of the moon, and its role (both visible and metaphoric) in uniting disparate geographies. The striking, even mesmerizing simplicity of the piece dispels even the most cynical criticism of its pretext, however. Over its forty-five-minute course, the video intercalates long takes of the moon’s surface with shots of unidentified and undistinguished cityscapes. The attendant sound track––a recording of a measured, tinny drip of water––unites these different images through its consistent, minimal pulse. A raised area inside the gallery serves as a viewing space and derives from Shinoda’s study of traditional Japanese gardens, in which such platforms serve as circumscribed zones for meditation and contemplation.

The work repays such contemplation. The slow swell of the moon across the screen––each time like a moonrise, but up close––never gets old. Having attached a cardboard tube to a video camera, Shinoda managed to capture some spectacular imagery with his homespun telescope. In fact, it’s often unclear whether it is the moon moving across a fixed frame or, conversely, Shinoda’s lens that pans across its surface. At times, the black screen––invaded only at its edge or corner by a semicircle of white––approaches a kind of post-painterly abstraction in motion. For a while, in any case, the extraplanetary eccentricities of the moon (think of the word lunatic) form the axis of our visual and existential attentions.

The moon’s smoldering surfaces seem not so much interrupted by the subsequent images of nocturnal cityscapes as matched by them. Atmospheric undulations (weather? wind?) cause the lights of city streets and airport hangars to flicker and sputter with a faintness reminiscent of heavenly bodies. The celestial sublime and the (sub)urban ugly seem not so different, in the end. It is only with the video’s credits that we learn the identity of these anonymous cities as Tokyo; Limerick, Ireland; Istanbul; and Boston (where Shinoda completed his work while in residence at the Gardner Museum). It is at the Gardner that Shinoda’s work will reach a kind of conceptual crescendo on December 31, when the piece will be projected in the museum’s courtyard on the occasion of the full moon and the New Year.

— Ara H. Merjian

Liz Glynn

ANTHONY GREANEY
460 Harrison Avenue
January 8–February 13

Liz Glynn, California Surrogates for the Getty, 2009, California yard waste, trash, plaster, Victory wax, 72 x 132 x 48".

Following The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, her contribution to the New Museum’s first triennial in 2009, Liz Glynn continues to explore the fraught relationship between institutions and art objects. For her latest venture, California Surrogates for the Getty, 2009, she trawled the Dumpsters of the venerable Los Angeles institute to dig up common materials (the exhibition checklist cites “California yard waste, trash, plaster, and Victory wax”) that she repurposed to make copies of the disputed antiquities returned by the museum to Italy in 2007.

Displayed on austere steel shelves and occasionally propped on the floor, Glynn’s “surrogates” are the kind of amateur, handmade reproductions of vases, shards, and statuettes that would never make it into the revered museum. Yet by standing in for the “authenticated” artifacts now returned to their “original” home, they are partially and perversely imbued with the aura of the missing objects. In this elision, Glynn invites us to follow the “aura trail,” which might eventually lead to the realization that the Roman Empire was itself built through an endless cycle of political and cultural conquests, lootings, borrowings, and imitations. It could also point to the professional and personal reputations that irrevocably lost their aura in the protracted litigations over the rightful state and institutional ownership of the ancient objects. And it may well implicate the very gallery that represents Glynn as a one-of-a-kind creative entity for peddling aura to the contemporary art consumer.

The strength of Glynn’s installation is that it does not restitute the status of the original but actively distributes its potency among a host of contingent sites (artist, spectator, gallery, museum, and nation-state). Though the business of aura may be stronger than ever, Glynn’s “surrogates” reveal the impossibility of locating or maintaining a unique point of origin.

— Nuit Banai

“Heartland”

SMART MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
5550 South Greenwood Avenue
October 1–January 17

View of “Heartland,” 2009. Left: Cody Critcheloe, Boy, 2009. Right: Carnal Topor, Purifications of the CalmDome, 2009.

This eye-opening group exhibition highlights the work of visual artists and other cultural producers who take tactical advantage of their peripheral geographic relationship to major urban cultural centers. From its title onward, “Heartland”—a collaboration between the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands—simultaneously embraces and debunks regional clichés. The independent spirit, bootstrapping gumption, and friendliness often attributed to midwesterners, for example, here takes the form of a determined DIY mind-set, a willingness to collaborate, and a savvy ability to get the job done by “making do.”

Such methods are certainly not exclusive to this region, but they are arguably most prevalent (and essential) in cities like Detroit, Kansas City, Chicago, and Memphis. Falling real estate prices have enabled the Detroit-based, community-minded collective Design 99 to purchase studio and storefront space, while Lowndes County, Alabama—the birthplace of the first independent African-American political party—provides a rich vein of unwritten sociopolitical history for artist Jeremiah Day to tap. Oral histories and other forms of storytelling enable artists to situate a dislocated present in terms of a shared past or an imagined future, although sometimes, as in the comics-style drawings of Chicagoans Kerry James Marshall and Deb Sokolow, such place-based narratives can take surreal, truth-twisting turns.

The Chicago iteration of “Heartland” wisely includes smaller ancillary exhibitions of paintings by self-taught artist Joseph Yoakum and the Chicago Imagists, ensuring that the unique contributions of the city to the region’s art are not overlooked. Overall, however, the focus is on shared practices rather than common stylistic attributes.

— Claudine Ise

Richard Rezac

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY
118 North Peoria Street
January 8–February 13

Richard Rezac, Aesop (09-06), 2009, cast Hydrocal, aluminum, dyed silk, 17 1/4 x 24 x 20 1/2".

A quirky equilibrium characterizes Richard Rezac’s sculptural abstractions. They evoke the sleek minimalism of contemporary interior design as readily as they do the curvaceous flourishes of Baroque architecture, yet they claim allegiance to neither. Although Rezac is known for a concise, poised formal rigor, his recent sculptures prove he’s a master at contrasting textures, too. Viewed at a distance, many of their surfaces appear pristine, but closer inspection reveals tiny nicks, scratches, and smudges that serve to humanize his project.

The exhibition includes preparatory drawings that offer insight into the artist’s thinking process. Study for Untitled (09-08), 2009, suggests Rezac initially had a different orientation in mind for the resulting sculpture, which—like several others on view—is oriented along a tilted vertical axis. Almost all the works in this show are affixed to the wall slightly below eye level. Aesop, 2009, however, skims the concrete floor like a small sea barge. Two crisp, diaphanous dyed silk panels are suspended from tiny aluminum girders like flags (or curtains). The structure rests atop a sliced-up chalky white capsule cast from Hydrocal (a gypsum plaster).

The use of polished aluminum and bronze in several of the sculptures allows for the play of reflectivity and opacity while bringing to mind the streamlined functionalism of high-end kitchen and bathroom fixtures. The silk, cherrywood, and Hydrocal suggest tactility and malleability, and yet the fact that silk and cherrywood are materials favored by the luxury-home-goods industry for their suggestion of richness, depth, and warmth adds a piquant fillip of irony to these works. Lyric and purposeless, the pieces are sculptural folly for the serious-minded viewer.

— Claudine Ise

Lauren E. Simonutti

CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY
300 W. Superior St.,
January 8–March 6

Lauren E. Simonutti, She Left a Light on but They Were Never Coming Back, 2007, toned gelatin-silver contact print, 5 x 4".

Lauren E. Simonutti’s black-and-white images depict meticulously staged representations of life as she experiences it, starring herself as the main character. In 2006, the Baltimore-based artist was diagnosed with rapid-cycling bipolar and schizoaffective disorder and since then she has lived alone, in “self-imposed isolation,” taking photographs in a house where none of the clocks tell time correctly––a house that is, for Simonutti, a haven, a stage set, a performer, and a collaborator.

Using sheets to create drapes, walls, and screens, she turns a single small corner of her home into theatrical sets and Surrealist tableaux. Peculiar arrangements of found objects—doll heads, mirrors, wooden horses, and candlesticks, for example—are transformed into charged and sometimes inscrutable personal lexica. Simonutti’s images have the vaporous appearance of nineteenth-century daguerreotypes. Her face, arms, hands, and legs are often disembodied, while doubled visages and apparitional forms make it clear that her photographs are, in some sense, playing tricks on viewers in the manner of Victorian-era spirit photography. She bleaches and tones each print in the darkroom, exaggerating shadows and eliminating contours while exacerbating an already palpable sense of dread.

The artist does not always succeed in avoiding redundancy and cliché, as an image of her bound in chains before an array of prescription medication unfortunately attests. At her best, however, Simonutti marshals familiar tropes judiciously in her portrayal of experiences that are deeply personal and profoundly misunderstood.

— Claudine Ise

Laura Letinsky

MONIQUE MELOCHE GALLERY
2154 W. Division
January 16–March 13

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #2, 2008, color photograph, 32 x 40". From the series “The Dog and the Wolf,” 2008–2009.

In her first series of domestic still-life photographs (“Morning, and Melancholia,” 2002–), Laura Letinsky put the contemporary kitchen countertop and the traditions of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings under analysis, as it were, revealing them both to be purveyors of deep-seated cultural meanings. In Letinsky’s subsequent bodies of work, the white tablecloth—traditionally a sign of cleanliness and elegance—figures as a screen on which a culture’s ideas surrounding food, desire, and sustenance are projected and consumed.

Succulence and decay, desire and the sense of repulsion that often follows satiety, are competing forces in the artist’s latest exhibition, a magnificently concise selection of five large-format color photographs culled from a new series titled “The Dog and the Wolf,” 2008–2009. These grimly elegiac images, all shot in the artist’s studio during the velvety gray hours of twilight, foreground to a greater extent than before the serene abjection at the heart of Letinsky’s project without sacrificing any of the exquisitely controlled formalism for which she is known.

The artfully strewn cellophane wrappers and fast-food packaging of her 2006 series “To Say It Isn’t So” have been replaced by a dead rabbit and pigeon, a pile of scooped-out oyster shells, and various minute scraps of organic detritus placed so precisely on the table’s surface as to suggest an excavation site rather than an abandoned meal. Shot from a range of perspectives, all of them somewhat disorienting, Letinsky’s dining table no longer appears as a deserted gathering spot. Now it seems more like a precipice, its contents pushed precariously close to the edge with nowhere left to go.

— Claudine Ise

Joseph Cohen

WADE WILSON ART
4411 Montrose Blvd.
January 8–February 13

Joseph Cohen, Proposition 135, 2009, reclaimed latex, enamel, stain, acrylic and enamel on pine, 23 x 20 x 2 1/2".

Prescriptive art can often unintentionally provoke apathy in the viewer—the adherence to a “rule-based” agenda may come across as shallow, if not didactic, pointing to self-involved interests that say little of a larger context. This is thankfully not the case in Joseph Cohen’s solo exhibition “Forging the Path of the Concrete.” His paintings are created solely from reclaimed, repurposed materials, like defective, off-color batches of paint mismixed at Home Depot, which are poured and layered onto found surfaces, suggesting oddly construed confectionery.

The fact that Cohen strictly limits his palette in such a manner fulfills both an eco-based agenda and a conservative approach to materials in general—waste not, want not. The results are oddly multifarious in their range and epic in scope. Yet the artist reveals enough of his process to come off as humble. Various stalactite-like formations give evidence of Cohen’s patient layering technique, adding a molten quality to the surface of each work. It is as though the paintings grew into the forms presented in the show, rather than having been forced into the traditional rectangle format. Although Cohen often blankets much of the final imagery in a layer of thick white, strategically exposed colorful stripes belie the serious intent behind the methodology—and that’s a good thing.

— Garland Fielder

Robert Pruitt

HOOKS-EPSTEIN GALLERY
2631 Colquitt,
January 16–February 13

Robert Pruitt, Be of Our Space World, 2009, charcoal, conté crayon, mixed media, 48 x 36".

A reference to the first DC Comic to feature a black superhero, Robert Pruitt’s new exhibition, “The Forever People,” attempts to harness the attitudes of the hippie generation. Pruitt shifts conceptual gears significantly with this latest work. Here, deep yet subtle juxtapositions are coupled with heartfelt humanity. The new works’ subjects—rendered in charcoal and conté—hail from some mixed-up time and place, their poses, clothes, and attitudes reflecting fractured identities. A serene iconography sets “The Forever People” apart from the artist’s other drawings, which juxtapose American and African identities but subsume their personalities to their accoutrements. These latest drawings are given more care and real character, their countenances powerfully expressive but not caricatures.

Superbad Garveyite (all works 2009) portrays a defiant figure standing tall, his pose half Bad-era Michael Jackson, half Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, 1830. He wears a bright red shirt emblazoned with the Kongo Cosmogram, an African and Caribbean religious symbol signifying the continuity of life. An exuberantly hued painting by Sam Gilliam is creased and draped over his shoulders. Be of Our Space World focuses on the chiseled profile of a woman sitting at rigid attention. Her updo resembles Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1920, extending diagonally to a precarious height; this Constructivist reference is coupled with the new age astrological print of her loose-fitting shirt. Pruitt’s work still holds some of the acidity that propelled black radicalism into the twenty-first century, but the artist has gone on to search for harmonies among the cultural elements that capture his attention. Between Kehinde Wiley’s exalting, illustrative portraits and Michael Ray Charles’s biting historical remixes comes Pruitt’s interpretation of contemporary Americana as seen through the lens of African-American identity.

— Sean Carroll

Dana Frankfort

INMAN GALLERY
3901 Main Street
January 15–March 6

Dana Frankfort, COMING, 2009, oil on panel, 36 x 48".

With their bright palettes and rough rectangular forms, Dana Frankfort’s latest canvases recall early Rothko. Hovering bodies of vivid colors, applied in jagged brushstrokes, pleasurably shock the system on a gray winter day. As in her previous works, Frankfort seeks to go beyond a formal interpretation of color and form through her incorporation of various words rendered in capital letters. Ubiquitous in her work for more than a decade, they are never straightforward. Filling up the canvas from top to bottom, her words seem the equivalent of screaming at the heavens in our digital age.

The artist singles out the elastic potential of her letterforms and teases subtlety out of surprising places. Titled “PICTURES,” this exhibition explores subjective readings of words without specificity. Like Day-Glo interpretations of Color Field painting, a hazy world of emotion is all one has to contextualize HEALTH and FITNESS (all works 2009). COMING is a nearly blank white canvas, its titular word obscured to a faded hint of translucent yellow on a ground of neon orange. Many layers of color are painted beneath the surface; purples and yellows leak out at the edges of a panel mounted to a wooden frame. Frankfort shines a light on communication’s foibles here, which seem obscure even in plain sight.

— Sean Carroll

Natalie Alper

SERAPHIN GALLERY
1108 Pine Street
December 18–January 25

Natalie Alper, October #1, 2009, mixed media on iridescent ground on paper, 30 x 22".

Stimulated by science’s systems, the Boston-based artist Natalie Alper engages apparently neutral content that supports intensive creative interpretation: a kind of confident skepticism fusing multiple foci and indeterminate layering. Her drawings, which are worked on one at a time from start to finish, offer a specific, complex processing of paper, marking instruments, and inks. The fifteen “Energy Fields” in this exhibition invoke chaos theory, matter, and energy in flux, as well as conditions of causality and entropy related to physics. The hyperactive drawings’ connections to science—itself an inductive field—are a generative source for suggestive abstraction.

Dense fields vibrate to the point of appearing nearly mobile. The drawings’ iridescent interference grounds spawn coloristically nuanced backdrops for marks that destabilize perception of consistent presence or absence, inertia or momentum. Spatially intricate webs composed of thick and thin accumulations of mixed media—sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque—lend the work a weirdly selective luminosity, due to the refractive and reflective actions of the pieces’ mica-derived pigments.

Refusing predetermined results, the artist subverts open and closed systems, volume and void, materiality and immateriality. Her art divides into rectangular fields resembling spliced film, an interruption and resumption in action; in aggregate, it conjures Leonardo’s ineffable “Deluge” drawings. Alper’s works are closely informed by her own painting practice, in which a complementary expressivity is produced through graphite underpinning, as well as layering of metallic surfaces and slippery, negative webbing.

As 2010 begins, enthusiasm for drawing and its agency in sorting multiple conceptual stimuli appears alive and well. The medium’s ability to stake new territories for artists individually and collectively seems demonstrably re-excited. Alper’s “Energy Fields” should thicken the discourse.

— Judith Tolnick Champa

Christopher Rauschenberg

ELIZABETH LEACH GALLERY
417 N.W. 9th Avenue
January 7–January 30

Christopher Rauschenberg, Paris Flea Market XXI, 2009, color photograph, 24 x 36". From the series, “Paris Flea Market,” 2009.

Christopher Rauschenberg’s photographs of flea-market scenes in Paris’s Marché aux Puces in Saint Ouen were taken over several trips to the City of Light in 2008 and 2009. Rauschenberg knows the city well. For his study “Paris Changing,” 1997–1998, he rephotographed five hundred places depicted in Eugène Atget’s heroic documentation of its streets and surfaces. Rauschenberg then paired eighty-eight of his images alongside Atget’s originals in a book published by Princeton Architectural Press. The work is as intimate and distilled as the memory of a loved one.

The Marché aux Puces prohibits photography. Rauschenberg skirted the issue by mentally composing each image, quietly removing the camera from his pocket, and shooting from the hip. He positions the viewer below the picture plane. As a result, the viewer gazes upward into many of Rauschenberg’s rich constructions. Like his father’s “combines,” these photographs speak to the history of assemblage and Surrealism; they contain a welcoming sureness achieved only through many years of looking.

In the “Paris Flea Market” photographs, two- and three-dimensional spaces morph and switch states. Objects like the flat cardboard astronaut in Paris Flea Market XXI, 2009, seem animated and alive while surrounded by a hanging wire chair, an old dressing mirror, and a cacophony of ephemera. In other photographs, paintings and mirrors reflect and multiply the things around them, obscuring individual objects within an expanding landscape. The effect is lulling and dreamy, like a hall of mirrors full of welcoming distractions.

Rauschenberg is well known for his passionate desire to experience the world photographically. The “Paris Flea Market” series forced the artist to work a bit differently––perhaps more slowly. The satisfying result of this shift in practice is one of the artist’s strongest bodies of work to date.

— Stephanie Snyder

Carey Young

MUSEUM OF ART, RISD
Rhode Island School of Design, 224 Benefit Street
October 9–April 18

Carey Young, Declared Void, 2005, vinyl drawing and text on wall, dimensions variable.

As this small show demonstrates, Carey Young has considered deeply the realm of corporate-structured business and the legalization of Western culture. In the nearly fifteen-minute video Uncertain Contract, 2008, an actor in business attire roams an empty white set while dramatizing legalese such as parties, tender, and notice—at one point furiously punching an imagined victim while repeating the word “damages.” Body Techniques (after Parallel Stress, Dennis Oppenheim, 1970), 2007, is a photograph of Young, in a business suit, resting facedown in a hollow of sand on the outskirts of an anonymous Arab boomtown. The work comments ruefully on the fate of the individual in transnational capitalist enterprises while evoking still other artistic precedents, including performance documentation of Valie Export’s 1972–76 series “Body Configurations.”

The exhibition hinges on Declared Void, 2005, a cubic space delineated by a thick black vinyl line applied to the walls and floor. Alongside it, a text declares: BY ENTERING THE ZONE CREATED BY THIS DRAWING, AND FOR THE PERIOD YOU REMAIN THERE, YOU DECLARE AND AGREE THAT THE US CONSTITUTION WILL NOT APPLY TO YOU. The contractual language imbues the emptiness with a charge that simultaneously repulses and seduces. During my visit, two men discussed the work’s implications (“Someone could come in there and strip my clothes off and beat me to a bloody pulp, I guess”) and a woman gingerly stretched her foot across the line. She withdrew it quickly and then, for the rest of her time in the gallery, skirted this seeming black hole of rights. In fact, while crafting the piece Young sought legal advice on how best to re-create the “gray area” of the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay. An irony, no doubt intended by this consistently observant artist, is the presence just above Declared Void of one of the museum’s surveillance cameras, watching over the scene below impassively.

— Brian Sholis

“Vantage”

ARCHER GALLERY AT CLARK COLLEGE
1933 Fort Vancouver Way, FAC 101,
January 12–February 6

Isaac Layman, Drawers (2 of 3), 2008, color photograph, Plexiglas, wood, enamel, 28 x 36". From the series “Drawers,” 2008.

The best works in “Vantage” urge viewers to rethink how perspective is visually and conceptually constructed, and how each artist’s simple yet clever manipulations confound how an object is viewed and made. Isaac Layman’s “Drawers,” 2008, for instance, consists of photographs of the interior of kitchen drawers. Ziploc bags, Saran Wrap, and aluminum foil appear as straight documents until the viewer slowly notices the impossible depths of field and color shifts in his remarkably saturated and high-resolution composites. However technically impressive, Layman’s work leaves one with the banal conclusion that through the lens of an expensive camera, domesticity can be surreal.

Stephen Slappe’s video projection Bear Witness, 2010, is compiled from two experiments in which he mounted his video camera to a rotating device. (One offers a panoramic view of a tranquil graveyard; the other captures a man making faces while yawning, screaming, or grimacing against a green screen.) In the resultant video, the man is inserted into the graveyard, creating a disjointed scene in which neither the landscape nor the figure coalesces, yet they connect through the viewer’s ability to unravel their parallel positions.

Greg Pond and Golan Levin each contribute impressive works utilizing custom software for sound and imaging, while Avantika Bawa’s deceptively simple Points (For Brunelleschi), 2010, balances the exhibition by utilizing the decidedly humble materials of latex paint and a wooden sawhorse. However, it is Victoria Haven’s “Oracle,” 2009, that possesses the more subtle poetry in approach to the subject. To create this photographic series, Haven tied string to the ends of pins and stuck them into a wall, creating a web of polygons and triangles. Shadows from the string echo the shapes on the wall, making them appear as geometric drawings of volume. That these simple experiments with light and string are captured with a camera––a tool that flattens space––further teases out the subtle distinctions that occur between two and three dimensions.

— Micah Malone

“Telling Secrets: Codes, Captions and Conundrums in Contemporary Art”

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS
1250 New York Avenue NW
October 9–January 10

Alison Saar, Snake Man, 1994, woodcut and lithograph on paper, 33 1/2 x 42 1/2".

By including numerous works from the 1960s through the ’90s—and by omitting performance and video—the curators of “Telling Secrets: Codes, Captions, and Conundrums in Contemporary Art” imbue the show with a strangely old-school feel, seeming to insist that the pieces on view, and more traditional media in general, haven’t fallen from the limelight through any fault of their own. The featured artists, doyennes like Ann Hamilton and Niki de Saint Phalle, are all female, and given the museum’s mission of promoting women in the arts, an unavoidable question arises: Ought questions of gender inform our read of this wide-ranging exhibition?

The answer appears to be yes. Take, for instance, Jane Hammond’s large-scale painting Untitled, 1989: A female silhouette in a big-bustled dress stands surrounded by the words JITTERS and DEFENSIVE—two terms Hammond pulled from a review of her work. The defiantly blunt painting attains a nuanced moment: a scribble of blue whose form recalls both an AbEx flourish and a finger-painted smear of blood left by a horror movie’s hysteria-afflicted antiheroine.

Dominating the center of the room, Cathy de Monchaux’s classic Red, 1999, is the anatomical model to Hammond’s psychological profile. Its sexual imagery aside, de Monchaux’s bowl-shaped sculpture, lined with pleated maroon velvet and bound with rivets, evokes a Victorian duality of delicacy and industry, its prolate form echoing that of Lee Bontecou’s gorgeous Sixth Stone I, 1964, nearby. Deborah Mesa-Pelly’s photographs also explore a juxtaposition of mystery and functionality; in Coalbin, 1999, a woman on her hands and knees—her face hidden from view—wears a vermilion fleece jacket that lights up an otherwise subdued scene of machinery and abstract, blurry forms. But in light of the exhibition’s concerns, perhaps it is Alison Saar’s iconic woodcut and lithograph that ultimately serves as a conceptual linchpin of sorts. In Saar’s work, a talismanic, blank-eyed male subject clenches a snake in his jaws; only here is the exhibition’s titular conundrum finally represented by the image of a man.

— Dawn Chan