picks June 28, 2019

Louie Palu

Long understood as a harsh and placid region, the Arctic is now undergoing profound changes: As the permafrost thaws, it releases additional carbon, further warming the climate. Flora and fauna must acclimate to new seasonal patterns. But the changes are also geopolitical: Cold War–era tensions are flaring as the United States, Russia, Canada, and other countries lay claim to the top of the globe. The increased military presence there in recent years has been masterfully documented by photojournalist Louie Palu, as this exhibition of twenty-four works attests. His elegant compositions reveal

print December 2018

Ian Hamilton Finlay

A certain subset of modernists was eager to demonstrate that what seems newest is old, even archaic, and that what appears most radical in contemporary culture has its source in centuries past. Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) first came to attention in the 1950s for his innovations in concrete poetry. But the Scottish poet, gardener, sculptor, and prolific collaborator was equally influenced by the poetry of Virgil and the unfolding of the French Revolution. This show, Finlay’s tenth at the gallery, attempted to give viewers a sense of Little Sparta, a garden on a farm near Edinburgh, which

interviews June 25, 2018

Are.na

Are.na is an online platform for creative thinking and collaborative research. Founded in 2011 by artists Charles Broskoski, Daniel Pianetti, and Chris Sherron, today Are.na is a flourishing web-based community. Artists use it to conduct research; teachers use it to share course materials and interact with their students; and museums and galleries use it to host blogs and interactive exhibitions. Here, the Are.na team discusses the platform and the ideas that underpin its structure and development.

WE BUILT ARE.NA INITIALLY FOR OURSELVES. A few of us were making art online, and some of our peers

picks May 04, 2018

Judy Linn

In the early 1970s, Judy Linn took photographs of three friends who later became quite famous. Those pictures have overshadowed the remarkable artworks she has made since, something this exhibition, curated by Arlene Shechet, helps redress. The images pinned unframed to this gallery’s walls are mostly from the last two decades, and they demonstrate Linn’s remarkable talent for rendering light tangible, her eye for the quotidian, and her droll humor.

In a photograph of a pickup truck, light filters through the windows to settle on its interior surfaces like a thin coating of dust; in thruway,

picks February 08, 2018

Steven Beckly

Twenty years ago, after the dissolution of a romantic relationship, American artist Roni Horn began traveling to London to photograph the River Thames. She created restrained images dense with surface incident and which suggest complex depths. The young Canadian artist Steven Beckly is also drawn to water, but the unframed photographs in this exhibition convey buoyancy and transformation. The dark beauty of Horn's watery images contrasts with Beckly's light touch.

The show's title, “Meirenyu,” is a transliteration of the Mandarin word for “mermaid.” The mythical creature's hybridity provides a

interviews January 02, 2018

Lucas Foglia

The San Francisco–based artist Lucas Foglia just published Human Nature (Nazraeli Press, 2017), his third book of photographs. An exhibition of this work is currently on view at Fredericks & Freiser in New York through January 20, 2018. The same body of work will travel to Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam from February 2 to April 15, 2018 and then to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago from July 19 to September 20, 2018. Here, Foglia discusses the labor and thought that went into creating the photographs in this series and the idea of a “relationship” that underpins them.

MY FIRST

picks May 21, 2017

Jonah Samson

In late 1944, the Surrealist writer André Breton arrived on the Atlantic coast of Canada. Haunted by the political and personal ravages of war, he wrote Arcanum 17, a strange, genre-bending meditation on the search for “light” along the paths of “poetry, liberty, and love.” The illumination he sought, Breton made clear, was feminine—an antidote to the toxic masculinity that had torn his world asunder.

The artist Jonah Samson recently moved east from Vancouver to Cape Breton Island, not far from the site of Breton’s Canadian sojourn. His newest exhibition of exactingly repurposed found photographs,

film December 16, 2016

Nine Lives

KATY GRANNAN’S debut feature-length film, The Nine, is bisected by an off-screen murder. Police find a body floating beneath the South Ninth Street Bridge in Modesto, California, a hardscrabble Central Valley town about ninety minutes east of San Francisco. The news spooks the film’s central characters, who live in and around the area known as the Nine, and whose vulnerability is sharpened by the prospect of a predator. Grannan and her sound editor, Gus Koven, create a wash of overlapping chatter after the news breaks. Eventually, a woman intones, “They say everybody dies in threes, but this

picks August 12, 2016

Efrat Natan

Efrat Natan was raised during the middle of the twentieth century on Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin, in Israel’s Beit She’an Valley. Without relying too heavily upon her life story, this thoughtful forty-year survey underscores how Natan connects the everyday materials of that time and place to broader, elemental forces. Undershirts, tent fabric, netting, vinyl records, and farm implements are among the items Natan transforms into sculptures, installations, performance props, and other artworks. As a first-time visitor to Israel, I’m sure I missed this art’s many resonances with the nation’s history and

picks April 06, 2016

Saul Fletcher

If you only encounter a Saul Fletcher exhibition every few years, as I have, you can miss how his art evolves. It is easier to recall his photographs’ consistencies, such as the small size of the prints or the wan atmosphere created by their pale lighting and muted colors. His first solo exhibition in Los Angeles samples two decades of photographs; in doing so, it reveals the variety Fletcher achieves within such aesthetic constraints. During the late 1990s, the artist drifted through various rooms, shooting from oblique angles to create semiabstract compositions—of his grandmother’s bathtub,

interviews June 04, 2013

Tony Feher

Artist Tony Feher is the subject of a twenty-five-year retrospective that originated at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston and is on view at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, until September 15. Feher, known for redeeming everyday objects and consumer goods through careful juxtaposition and placement, speaks about the new works he made for the deCordova and about surveying his art career.

AS SOON AS I DROVE into the parking lot at the deCordova, I knew I wanted to create a work for the building’s grand staircase. The building is nestled into a hill, and you enter

print May 2013

Darren Almond

For nearly two decades, British artist Darren Almond has demonstrated a fascination with the particular ways in which we chart and divide up time. Some of his earliest and best-known pieces involve retro-style flip clocks, including one the size of a cargo container. He has made films and photographs about trains, which are governed by precisely calibrated timetables, as well as about mines, which operate in unchanging shifts. The sixteen large-scale landscape photographs in this exhibition seem to exist outside the choreographed nature of much of Almond’s other work. The pictures are part of

print March 2013

Thomas Barrow

This exhibition surveyed more than thirty-five years of photographer Thomas Barrow’s art, from the early series “Cancellations,” 1974–81, for which he first became widely known, to a recent body of work, “Detritus Bags,” 2009–, made by placing objects and images into small plastic pouches. At first, little seems to unite the work at the two ends of this time span. The “Cancellations” are small black-and-white prints of banal landscape photographs taken in the American West, each of which is interrupted by an X made by incising the negative with an ice pick. Among the objects tightly packed into

print February 2013

Barb Choit

Memories fade, so we invented a chemical process by which we can affix images of our world to paper. Yet photographs also fade, so we place them behind protective glass or store them away from the very light that brings them into being. By making fading the theme of her second solo exhibition at this gallery, New York– and Vancouver-based artist Barb Choit devised a novel way to frame the impulses behind, as well as the fundamental facts of, the medium. (In doing so, she acknowledges but adroitly sidesteps the pervasive arguments about photography and death.) The twelve pictures she exhibited

print January 2013

Joel Meyerowitz

The first of a two-part survey of Joel Meyerowitz’s fifty-year career as a photographer, this exhibition presented nearly four dozen color and black-and-white prints of varying sizes. Today, Meyerowitz is known for large-format landscape images in often saturated, emotionally resonant colors, a vein of his work that had its spectacular debut with the 1977 exhibition of his “Cape Light” photographs at Witkin Gallery in New York; the book of that series is a milestone in the history of color art photography. By including no photographs shot later than 1976, this exhibition offered viewers a chance

print December 2012

Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Yasuhiro Ishimoto died this past February at the age of ninety. This exhibition functioned as a small homage to the artist, who, over the course of nearly six decades, worked in a wide range of styles. Although he was born in San Francisco, Ishimoto was raised in Japan and returned to the United States in 1939, when he planned to study agriculture in California. He was rounded up by American authorities during World War II and held in an internment camp for Japanese Americans. It was there, surprisingly enough, that he developed his passion for photography, which was to occupy him for the rest

picks November 26, 2012

Melanie Schiff

Four years ago Melanie Schiff moved from Chicago to Los Angeles. Despite the change in environment, her newest photographs demonstrate her increasing assuredness with motifs she has explored for nearly a decade. Her earliest works, made circa 2004, were beautiful but preciously arranged still lifes; in 2005 and 2006 she used beer bottles, mirror fragments, glow sticks, and compact-disc jewel cases to construct scenarios for her lens, many of which were evocative of post-Minimal or Conceptual art. This exhibition demonstrates she’s now equally capable of finding such scenes in the world around

picks November 25, 2012

Danny Lyon

In 2007 Les Blank, a filmmaker known for decades’ worth of work on quintessentially American subjects, ventured to China in order to make All in This Tea, a film about a tea importer. Now Danny Lyon, equally identified with America through his important series documenting civil rights activists, motorcycle gangs, prisoners, and urban renewal in Lower Manhattan, has also traveled across the Pacific. The thirty photographs in “Deep Sea Diver” are the fruit of six visits to Shanxi Province between 2005 and 2009. To his credit, Lyon looks beyond the glassy, garish urban surfaces often presented as

print November 2012

James Welling

There are two dominant ways in which photographers have envisioned the landscape of the American West. One, glorying in the land and emphasizing descriptive specificity, is rooted in government-survey pictures of the 1870s; the other, wry and admonishing, arrived a century later under the banner of New Topographics. But outside its well-documented urban areas, how have American photographers framed the country’s eastern half? Eliot Porter rendered Maine foliage in Technicolor, Paul Strand spent time in New England, and Joel Meyerowitz caught seaside towns bathed in rosy Cape light, but prevailing

picks October 05, 2012

Barney Kulok

The austere geometry and muscular presence of architect Louis Kahn’s late designs infuses the photographs Barney Kulok has taken of the Four Freedoms Park. In this exhibition, however, one won’t find conventional documentation of the park’s allée of linden trees, its open granite “room” at Roosevelt Island’s southern tip, or its bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt created by Jo Davidson. Kulok, who was granted access last year to the construction site, has instead brought back chiaroscuro fragments—moody gelatin silver prints that demonstrate remarkable tonal range and control but explain little about

Brian Sholis