“I picked up this wonderful word, ‘ventriloquism,’ and when I discovered photography, I realized that it was the perfect ventriloquist’s medium,” James Welling said in a 2003 interview with critic Jan Tumlir. “I could throw my voice into different sorts of pictures: I could speak in many different formal languages.” After thirty years, however, even a practice predicated on difference can yield tautologies. Not so for Welling; he has remained diligently attentive to the structural variations possible within his medium, moving with admirable fluidity from one innovative investigation to the next.

Like a sly human computer, Brooklyn-based artist John Delk amasses vast quantities of data, which he processes and shuffles, changing up the platform to reconsider the content. A typical project is Pressed (all works cited, 2009), in which he took issues of the Wall Street Journal published during the spring of 2008, extracted the 1,358 hedcuts that appeared during that period (the paper’s iconic small-scale portraits), and printed them on an extremely long scroll, in chronological order and to scale. Universally recognized faces often make multiple appearances and share this stage with ephemeral