ARTISTS’ CHOICE AN EXPANDED FIELD OF PHOTOGRAPHY
ARTISTS’ CHOICE AN EXPANDED FIELD OF PHOTOGRAPHY In conjunction with her solo exhibition, Liz Deschenes has chosen six artists to participate in a group show that looks at photography as an increasingly diversified medium which intersects and informs other fields of art making. Deschenes identified the artists—Dana Hoey, Miranda Lichtenstein, Craig Kalpakjian, Josh Tonsfeldt, Sara VanDerBeek, and Randy West—for their individual contributions to the medium and invited each to choose the work he or she would like to present. The resulting constellation of works demonstrates the artists’ wide-ranging approaches to their art and represents through both analog and digital formats the expanding field of photography in the current age. Though the selection of works does not conform to a traditional curatorial thesis, commonalities and shared interests emerge. Each artist offers a new perspective on the properties and processes of photography itself—be they formal, mechanical, or conceptual. The roles of light, depth, and scale are examined and re-thought, as are support, frame, and format. The works also challenge the medium’s historic associations with mimetic representation, the male gaze, and reproducibility. Several of the featured artists, like Deschenes herself, make work that is considered photographic but is made without a camera. For some, photography lays the groundwork for the moving image, while, for others, it functions as a jumping-off point for sculpture. Many of the artists also share an interest in architecture and site—variously documenting or creating images of built space, or by engaging directly with the physical conditions or history of the gallery space. All of the artists engage with a number of pictorial traditions, influenced by predecessors ranging from Josef Albers and Sol LeWitt to the Lumière brothers, Man Ray, and László MoholyNagy. These antecedents worked in multiple mediums and pushed the boundaries of photography through their embrace of experimentation and new technologies, which allowed them to envision the world anew. Similarly, the featured artists frequently question photography as a likeness of the real. They variously conceal, obscure, and confuse viewers’ perceptions and expectations of image making, offering new ways of seeing and presenting new realities. Susan Cross, Curator
Miranda Lichtenstein, Drop (yellow), 2014 Archival pigment print 50 × 33 3⁄10 inches Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York
Miranda Lichtenstein Miranda Lichtenstein’s works bring a sense of wonder to the act of looking, transforming the familiar into something unexpected. Her practice probes the possibilities of photography and perception, experimenting with both analog and digital formats, from Polaroids to inkjet prints. The exhibition opens with a video by Lichtenstein that reflects her interest in how developments in technology shape new ways of seeing. Danse Serpentine (doubled and refracted) (2010/2015) manipulates an 1896 hand-tinted film featuring the modern dance and lighting pioneer Loie Fuller. Louis Lumière— credited with the creation of the first true motion picture in 1894—captured Fuller as she danced in rippling silk robes on a stage dramatically lit from below. Fuller’s fluid, improvised movements are repeated by those of the fabric, and together they created a mesmerizing synthesis of multiple senses and disciplines and reflected both a modern aesthetic and the modern woman. Lichtenstein recorded on video a projection of the original (sourced from YouTube) layered on top of a second projection of the film reflected off a Mylar screen. She presents this composite image on black fabric, which references the theatrical curtain seen behind Fuller and further transforms the moving picture into an ambiguous reverie of light, color, and movement. Freestanding in the gallery and installed on Autopoles traditionally used to hold photo backdrops, the video asserts its objecthood as well as its relationship to photography. Photographs from the artist’s ongoing series “Screen Shadows” (begun in 2010) are also on view. These works picture everyday items— from vases to kitchen gadgets—silhouetted and obscured by an array of papers. The translucent papers act as filters between camera and object,
Still from Danse Serpentine (doubled and refracted), 2010/2015 HD video (48 sec., looped), black cloth, Autopoles Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York
and simultaneously have a flattening effect and introduce a patterned foreground. The resulting images play with the viewer’s perception of surface, distance, and scale; when enlarged, the small table-top objects take on the uncanny appearance of architecture. These graphic images bring to mind the experimental photographs of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, especially their photograms, which were created by laying objects directly on photosensitized paper and exposing them to light. Although related to early twentieth-century practices, Lichtenstein also sees her “Screen Shadows” as a reflection of the dominant visual condition of the back-lit image made ubiquitous by computer screens and cell phones.
Dana Hoey Dana Hoey’s photographs address the problematics of representing the female figure and probe the complexity of female relationships. Their imagery alludes to familiar elements of the so-called female experience, yet stops just short of presenting discernible narratives, while celebrating various female dynamics and forms of power. Her subjects, which include pregnant smokers, tattooed mechanics, and gray-haired women of a certain age, defy stereotypes and challenge the limited portrayals of women in the media. Her “Pattern Recognition” series (2006) featured collaged images of women over 40 along with pornographic nudes, arranged in geometric quilt patterns. The works mix photography and female textile traditions to expose perverse social norms. At MASS MoCA, Hoey debuts Fighters (2014 – 15), a four-channel video installation starring American kickboxer Alex Stagi and former professional Muay Thai fighter Kru Natalie Fuz. The artist filmed the women sparring in three two-minute rounds (staged with the help of fight choreographer Joe Falanga). Two photographic portraits on the wall outside the projection space function like fight posters advertising the match. The video, projected on four walls in a room that mimics the tight, square shape of a boxing ring, situates the viewer as if in the center of the ring. In order to follow the action, which moves from wall to wall, circling the viewer, he or she is forced to react much like the fighters. The moving camera and multiple, shifting viewpoints are disorienting and convey the profound sensory complexity of the art of fighting. The video documents the fight in real time, with no jump cuts and few close-ups and other dramatic tropes, denying the scopophilia —the sexualized pleasure in looking—that the image of two women fighting might otherwise
Still from Fighters, 2014 – 15 Four-channel video (9 min. 13 sec., looped) Courtesy of the artist and Petzel Gallery, New York Photo: Pete Mahoney
inspire. Instead, the viewers are meant to experience the installation as if they were in a fight themselves, with images popping up just outside their peripheral vision the way a hook punch might suddenly appear. Hoey calls the work “a feminist proposition and an utterly pragmatic investigation of female power.”
Craig Kalpakjian Many of Craig Kalpakjian’s works present spatial conundrums, illusions of three dimensions that trouble the distinctions between inside and outside, artifice and reality. The two large inkjet images in the exhibition grew out of several of the artist’s earlier series, including one inspired by Josef Albers’ “Homage to the Square.” Kalpakjian reinterprets Albers’ iconic series of nested squares in his own digitally generated images which similarly exploit the effects that adjacent colors have on one another while exaggerating the illusion of receding space. The slightly puzzling geometries of Kalpakjian’s works also relate to an earlier group of computergenerated images of shadowy, architectural environments. Those enigmatic impressions of imagined corridors and corners devoid of people possess an unsettling sense of place and the hint of an invisible but sentient presence. Kalpakjian’s interests in cinema, Modernist architecture, minimalism, and the psychology of space intersect in the haunting and seductive new works on view. They appear as deconstructed grids of squares derived from three-dimensional planes that register between deep, dark black and modulated shades of grey. In one of the works, two hazy, circular forms bring to mind the flash of a camera. They give the impression that behind the flat picture plane are two
Untitled, 2014 Inkjet print on paper mounted on stretched linen 88 × 88 inches Courtesy of the artist
glowing lights emerging from an expanse of infinite geometry— perhaps the yawning abyss of outer space as visualized in science fiction films. Made without a camera, the works speak to the complexities of image production in the digital age; printed on photo paper, attached to linen, and stretched like a canvas, the computer-generated works can be read as painting, drawing, or photography. Their size and square format, as well as the texture of the paper and the intensity of the black ink, lend them a powerful presence as three-dimensional objects.
Josh Tonsfeldt Josh Tonsfeldt’s practice is rooted in the everyday and the accumulation of small gestures that build a larger narrative. He moves easily between mediums without hierarchy, and his photographs, sculptures, and videos develop very naturally out of the images and materials of the artist’s daily life. His photographs have an intimate, almost unintentional quality, as well as a sensitivity to composition, line, color, and dimension. They are often imbued with a spatial complexity that is underscored by frequent references to screens, windows, reflections, and other filters. Tonsfeldt’s works frequently play off the images and materials involved in the production, storage, and presentation of images. Literally and metaphorically deconstructing the mechanisms of photography, he creates work which isolates, emphasizes, or disrupts both analog and digital components of the medium, including materials such as printer inks, photographic papers, and the optical films used in LCD screens. Tonsfeldt’s two-dimensional images exist as stand-alone works, and as elements that are framed, contained, or referenced within sculptural configurations. At times, the fundamental intention of photography—the impulse to record an ephemeral moment or image—is translated entirely into other formats in the artist’s production: a spider’s web made visible with spray paint, traces of pigment arrested in plaster. Tonsfeldt’s related interests in how vision is framed, and how his images are framed, easily translate to his sculptural practice as a concern for the particular space that frames the work. He usually works in direct response to a site. His installation at MASS MoCA includes a selection of photographic works, alongside sculptures fabricated in situ, including a poured plaster slab with ghost-like images embedded in its surface. The suite of works on view articulates a sensibility or an approach to looking, rather than presenting a specific narrative thread. Light filters through various membranes—a window, a blanket— while a single photograph is installed behind prism film, a material used to focus and enhance the light in phones and laptops. Nearby, an LCD screen sits on the floor of the gallery and partially supports a board which in turn hangs by the cord that powers the light of the monitor. The precarious configuration hints at the series of relations that inspire the way we see.
Untitled, 2014 (detail) Pigment print and Hydrocal in artist’s frame 211⁄2 × 151⁄2 × 13⁄4 inches Courtesy of the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York
Randy West Randy West distills his subjects into minimal gestures of line, form, and texture. He takes interest in both the natural and the man-made, creating unexpected representations of common objects that range from birds’ nests to fabric to crumpled photographic paper. He provides a deeper look at the details of his subjects while pushing their images to the edge of abstraction, a process informed by the Modernist evolution toward simple forms. At the same time, his use of common digital devices—primarily scanners and printers— to achieve such abstractions keeps his practice grounded in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Edge of the Cloud, 2011 30 inkjet prints 111⁄2 × 83⁄4 inches each Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York
Edge of the Cloud (2011) is a grid of thirty inkjet prints which were created by digitally scanning an object into the computer. Like many of West’s works, Edge of the Cloud eliminated the camera and traditional film processes in its making. West scanned a single sheet of paper thirty times; each resulting print contains subtle shadows and marks caused by the handling of the paper over time and a black border created by the scanner’s light bleeding around the edge of the paper. When viewed from a distance, the thirty images give the overall impression of a single, pale-gray cloud. In an ironic twist, the image of the cloud was created entirely by chance, a reading of the collection of prints that could be compared to the impulse to find recognizable images in cloud formations. West’s work brings up associations of the internet “cloud” and contemporary modes of looking at and preserving images as his works are made in a computer and rendered for a screen—though he chooses to print them. It also references Alfred Stieglitz’s well-known series of cloud images from the 1920s titled “Equivalents.” Stieglitz’s works, like West’s images, are often devoid of recognizable referents and walk the line between representation and abstraction. West further complicates this relationship by making images that have a 1:1 correlation in size between the original and its representation. Moreover, as each representation or copy is slightly different from the previous ones, the artist alters notions of mechanical reproduction, transforming as he does each reproduction into both an autonomous and unique print with the aura of an original as well as an element of a larger aesthetic whole.
Sara VanDerBeek Sara VanDerBeek’s works investigate the relationship between images and objects. She is interested in photography’s relationship to memory and how images inform our understanding of their subjects, often distorting the sense of time, place, and scale. In a seminal early series VanDerBeek photographed assemblages of images that she culled from art books, magazines, and her family’s archive. While these sculptural arrangements were constructed solely for the camera, in 2011 the artist began exhibiting objects alongside her photographs. Often these cast works are distilled shapes that recall the repeated forms of ancient ziggurats, Brancusi columns, or LeWitt cubes. Recently VanDerBeek has been photographing cities from New Orleans and Baltimore to Rome and Rotterdam. The artist captures the particular spirit and texture of these sites in her documentation of subtle interstitial moments, found objects, and art historical collections. She is often drawn to the images and rituals that are shared across civilizations, finding similarities between preColumbian pottery, Classical statuary, and American quilts. Her practice can be read in relation to André Malraux’s notion of the musée imaginaire which posited that photography allows anyone access to a virtual museum— removing scale and context but allowing a self-curated experience of works from all over the world. At MASS MoCA, the artist presents a group of new works, including photographs and two castconcrete sculptures. These works are influenced by the museum’s history as a producer of printed and dyed fabrics and continue the artist’s interest in how the past informs the present.
Lace Shadows, 2015 (details) Two digital C Prints 18 × 12 inches Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Balanced Cloth (2015) features an image of loosely layered, grid-like mesh that the artist printed on fabric, which is wrapped on two open frames that recall looms. The work is inspired by the important roles that textiles and women’s labor have played in the livelihood of generations, from Antiquity to the Industrial Revolution. Lace Shadows (2015) captures shadows cast by a thin piece of tatting lace that the artist’s great-aunt made and preserved among only a few possessions when she immigrated to America from Denmark. The work references William Henry Fox Talbot’s experimental cameraless salt prints of lace made in the 1830s and 1840s. In VanDerBeek’s images, the lace shadows rise and fade from view within a dark, dusky light, much like the past coming and going in our minds. VanDerBeek often uses this deep purple-tinged blue as a way to abstract recognizable imagery or push the familiar into the realm of the imaginary.
Artist Biographies Miranda Lichtenstein
Dana Hoey
Craig Kalpakjian
Miranda Lichtenstein was born in New York in 1969. She received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1990 and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1993. Her work has been exhibited at Hermès, New York; the Contemporary Austin (formerly AMOA-Arthouse); the Suburban, Oak Park, Illinois; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2002, she participated in the Residency Program and Fellowship at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France. Her work can be found in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. Lichtenstein is represented by Elizabeth Dee, New York. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Dana Hoey was born in San Francisco in 1966. She received a BA in philosophy from Wesleyan University in 1989 and an MFA in photography from Yale University in 1997. She has exhibited internationally at venues including the Liverpool Biennial; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and P.S. 1, New York; and has had notable solo exhibitions at the Albany Institute of History & Art; the University Art Museum at the University of Albany; the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland Baltimore County; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Her work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; PĂŠrez Art Museum Miami; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. Hoey is represented by Petzel Gallery, New York. She lives and works in upstate New York.
Craig Kalpakjian was born in 1961 in Huntington, New York and has a BA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania. His work has been shown at the Gebert Foundation in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; SculptureCenter, New York; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. Kalpakjian currently lives and works in New York City.
Josh Tonsfeldt
Randy West
Sara VanDerBeek
Josh Tonsfeldt was born in Independence, Missouri in 1979. He earned a BA from SUNY Purchase College in 2004 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2007. He has exhibited widely over the past decade. He recently completed projects at Rowhouse Projects in Baltimore, Maryland, and Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo in Bergamo, Italy. His work has also been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), Toronto; Bureau for Open Culture at the Elizabeth Foundation, New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver; White Columns, New York; SculptureCenter, New York; The Kitchen, New York; and Artist’s Space, New York. Tonsfeldt is represented by Simon Preston Gallery, New York. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Randy West was born in Indianapolis in 1960 and received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1986. His work has been exhibited at the George Eastman House, Rochester; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; Aperture Foundation, New York; Queens Museum, New York; Houston Center for Photography, Houston; The International Center of Photography, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; US Federal Reserve, Washington, D.C.; and the Aaron Siskind Foundation, New York, among others. West is represented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York. West splits his time between New York City and the Catskills.
Sara VanDerBeek, born in Baltimore in 1976, earned a BFA from the Cooper Union in 1998. She has had solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art; and the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She participated in the 12th Bienal deCuenca, Ecuador, and has exhibited work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others. VanDerBeek is represented by the approach, London; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; and Metro Pictures, New York. She currently lives and works in New York City.
Artists’ Choice An Expanded Field of Photography May 23, 2015 – April 2016
Dana Hoey Craig Kalpakjian Miranda Lichtenstein
Josh Tonsfeldt Sara VanDerBeek Randy West
This exhibition is supported by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Cover: Josh Tonsfeldt, Untitled, 2014 Cotton cloth, pigment prints on paper, electrical cable, maple, pigment print on diffusion film, pigment inks, finishing nails, prism film, Hydrocal 31 × 48¼ × 3 inches Courtesy of the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York
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