Isabel Flower

• previews May 2018

  Diamond Stingily

  The work of Chicago-born, New York-based multidisciplinary artist Diamond Stingily is hard to forget. I remember clearly when I first encountered it, on a Saturday afternoon in October 2016, at her second-ever solo gallery exhibition, hosted by Ramiken Crucible on New York’s Lower East Side. In the year and a half since, much critical attention has been given to Stingily’s calculated creations—usually some combination of sculpture, found objects, and video—and their commentary on the psychology of memory and on the ways in which structural

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  previews January 2017

  Deana Lawson

  Deana Lawson once described her inspirations as ranging from leather-bound family albums and lace curtains to acrylic nails and the A train. Her large-format photographs—mostly of strangers, many paired and in various stages of undress—are classically composed and lavishly detailed. Some of Lawson’s subjects hail from her Brooklyn neighborhood, but an interest in family, community, and the African diaspora has taken the artist to the American South, Haiti, Jamaica, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia. Lawson’s portraits (several of which will be

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  print October 2016

  the sneaker market

  BENJAMIN KAPELUSHNIK’S homegrown business has generated nearly a million dollars in profit, which would be impressive even if he wasn’t turning seventeen this month. But the Miami teen’s payday was only a tiny slice of the market he trades in, which experts estimate to be worth $1.2 billion: the secondary market for sneakers. Long an infamous, informal, and often underground enterprise, buying and selling sneakers has become big business, enticing not just the likes of the “Sneaker Don,” as Kapelushnik is known, but economists, technology executives, and venture capitalists. No one has examined

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  previews January 2016

  “Ordinary Pictures”

  “Ordinary Pictures” will investigate the pervasive relevance and versatility of stock photography—images often constructed as tropes and produced expressly for commercial use—through the postwar Conceptual art practices that appropriated and repurposed it as a means of cultural critique. Included are some thirty artists, many of whom do not (or did not) consider themselves “photographers” in the formal sense of the term, and whose backgrounds, interests, and outputs vary dramatically: Works by Ed Ruscha, Sturtevant, and Andy Warhol will mingle with those by Robert

• previews May 2015

  “Perfect Likeness: Photography and Composition”

  In his seminal 1972 essay “Understanding a Photograph,” John Berger wrote that “composition in the profound, formative sense of the word cannot enter into photography.” Such questions regarding the medium’s essential characteristics, its capabilities, and its “proper task” have been continually contested since its advent nearly two hundred years ago. But as photographic imagery becomes embedded within an ever-proliferating array of visual spaces, the contemporary viewer is even harder pressed to isolate and articulate the photograph’s distinguishing qualities. Ferguson’s

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  previews September 2014

  “Larry Sultan: Here and Home”

  The seductiveness of Larry Sultan’s photographs lies as much in their painterly hues as in the bodies(whether those of porn stars or parents)he scrupulously composed. But scopophilic indulgence alone does not define Sultan’s varied and radical oeuvre: He never shied away from scrutinizing photography’s particular mirage. Evidence (1977), for example, Sultan and fellow Californian Mike Mandel’s photobook compilation of decontextualized images culled from industrial and government archives, is at once explicit and maddeningly ambiguous, eliciting a sense of knowing and not