Maine Interlude

Maine has a gorgeous, rugged coastline. I just spent a week around Blue Hill, Maine with family, not doing much besides visiting, eating, and playing with color settings on my camera that I didn't know I had.

The seaweed there is a bright yellow-orange that reminded me of one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who came from Maine.

I shall go back again to the bleak shore

And build a little shanty on the sand

In such a way that the extremest band

Of brittle seaweed will escape my door

But by a yard or two, and nevermore

Shall I return to take you by the hand;

I shall be gone to what I understand

And happier than I ever was before.

The love that stood a moment in your eyes,

The words that lay a moment on your tongue,

Are one with all that in a moment dies,

A little under-said and over-sung;

But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies

Unchanged from what they were when I was young.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

I imagine the coast of Maine in winter would be a bleak thing indeed. In summer, however, it's quite glorious.

Photographer Eva Besnyö at the Jeu de Paume

There is a great article on Hyperallergic about the Eva Besnyö exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris right now. Besnyö was a Hungarian photographer who worked from the 1930s onward and died in 2003. This exhibition is the first to bring together her work from her early years in Berlin, her later years in the Netherlands, and her continued trips back to Hungary.

Although she come of age with other famous Hungarian emigre artists such as Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes, and Robert Capa, she has not gotten the same amount of recognition. Eva Besnyö (1910–2003): The Sensuous Image is up at the Jeu de Paume through September 23.

Eve Sussman's Stereoscopes at Pulse

Elevated Train, Eve Sussman 

I was happy to hear that Eve Sussman's stereoscopes did so well at Pulse.

"Creative Capital the generous grant-giving foundation, had surprising success at their upstairs location in the Impulse section — the part of the fair typically reserved for younger galleries with solo booths — even though the organization's main purpose was to preview pieces from their upcoming May benefit auction. They sold ten editions at $500 each (plus an auction ticket) from former grantee Eve Sussman’s stereoscopic “Elevated Train” series."

The stereoscopes actually put two images side-by-side, and when you look through the viewfinder your eye mixes the two scenes to create one 3D image. This is an old practice, as I remember having a wooden stereoscope with some 1840s-era scenes in my house growing up. Here though, Sussman took pictures of a JMZ platform, peering into the train cars as they passed at night and snapping people on the platform.

These images are from Creative Capital's blog, where you can find more of them and also learn more about the making of the work.

Coned In

On the street near City Hall.

Cindy Sherman: Clothes Make the Woman

Still from Doll Clothes, 1975

Check out my new essay on the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA up over on Escape Into Life. The big question: Do you find the path not taken in her work as tantalizing as I do?

The Rare Graffiti Tree and Other Urban Species from photographer Mitch Epstein

Photographer Mitch Epstein's work at up Sikkema Jenkins through this past weekend couldn't come at a better time. Outside, the first really Spring (or perhaps Summer?) weather had set the trees in bloom, and inside Epstein's homage to New York was similarly alush.

Epstein spent a year photographing the great trees of New York city (as you can see in the detail below NYC boasts the rare urban Graffiti Tree species). The trees, rather than people or buildings, become the focus of the shots.

Unfortunately the trees seem to be trying to kill me right now. All the blooming means seasonal allergies are here, and I am sneezing my head off. Find more information about the show here and more information about Epstein on his website http://www.mitchepstein.net/.

Carlos Garaicoa: White on White

Photo-topography, Carlos Garaicoa.  Galleria Continua at the Armory Show 2012.

It looked like styrofoam in person, but apparently artist Caralos Garaicoa transferred photographs to polyspan (I suspect a material a lot like styrofoam) to create these white images.

Garaicoa is a Cuban artist who tends to explore Cuba's identity and politics through its buildings. These archetectural scenes were clearly composed, but the precision of them crumbles away as you look closer.

Radcliffe Bailey's Ships and Sea

In the Garden, 2008

Atlanta has this interesting past that makes you want to dig deeper and understand what was once there, even though it may be covered...Sherman burnt down the city. They say when you want to get rid of something, you burn it, but you don’t really get rid of it. I can look out my back door and see a lot -- Radcliffe Bailey via NY Times

Radcliffe Bailey's work Seven Steps, above, was on view at the Georgia Museum of Art when I went recently, and I love the layered colors and use of materials offset by the sepia photograph. It was recently part of an exhibition at the High Museum in Atalanta that I just missed, Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine, showcasing the Atlanta-based artist's work on its biggest level yet. Bailey uses a variety of materials to explore history both personal and collective, and he engages memory as a device to encourage healing through art.

Tricky, 2008

Bailey is maybe better know for a layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials, and text that began when he was given some old family photographs to work with. But looking at the images from the exhibition, I was really drawn to some of his more sculptural pieces, like Tricky, above. A textured black surface juxtaposed with the jaunty tilt of the hat encase a slave ship. In The Antelope, he again presents a black ship, this time encased in glass like a fossil and sailing over white cloth/paper. 

The Antelope, 2010

The large installation Windward Coast creates a rolling ocean of piano keys harvested from some 400 pianos, suggesting the oceans traversed in the slave trade and in their midst a lone black head, the same glittery texture as the ship in Tricky, appears.

Detail view of Windward Coast

The artist does not consider his work to be solely dark or only about slavery however (as you might not realize by the pieces I'm showing here). Regarding Windward Coast, he told the New York Times, “I think about all the music that was probably played on those keys. An ocean is something that divides people. Music is something that connects people. Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk -- it’s a different sound that takes you somewhere else. It’s also about being at peace.”

Installation View, Memory as Medicine at the High Museum

More about the exhibition here and images of the artist's work here.

Which one is the doppelganger?

The doppelganger is an always unsettling idea. While today you might use the word to refer to a double or lookalike, historically a doppelganger represented evil and misfortune in a paranormal form and seeing a doppelganger almost always conincided with an unfortunate event. Swiss artist Cornelia Hediger tackles the darker connotation in her current show up at Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn.

Hediger constructs complex narratives in this set of photos featuring two women posing together in different ways. These colorful and rich images suggest a narrative with a cast of two, or perhaps one, characters whose relationship is ambiguous and darkly suggestive.

2/15/08 

I love how she distorts perpective in these photos, so that above the woman in pink appears much small than the woman in black, and below the bed makes them both appear tiny.

12/03./07

I really enjoyed them, but as I viewed one after another I began to feel they were overly staged. There were so many props that the models enagaged with, when often their body language was the most telling and real part of the photo.

More images and exhibition details here. Cornelia Hediger is up at Klompching Gallery through October 21.

A "tilted" view of DUMBO: Isidro Blasco at Smack Mellon

Tilted by Isidro Blasco, at Smack Mellon during the DUMBO Arts Festival, was a large wooden framwork installation that sprawled out across the first gallery, dividing the space into little rooms covered in photographs. The photogrpahs themselves were of local neighborhood, but cut and pasted into and around each other in a way that created its own 3-dimensional, and tilted, space. They recreate the DUMBO streetscape and the Smack Mellon gallery itself. 

Blasco is Spanish artist with a background in architecture. That comes across clearly here: the bare sticks of wood at odd angles suggest deconstructed-construction.

It's rather like taking apart the pieces of something to figure out how it works, except in this case rather than a toy or an engine, it is a nieghborhood, and more specifically a gallery in a neighborhood. One of the more interesting and visually-stimulating pieces I saw during the DUMBO Arts Festival, Tilted really succeeded in taking over and interacted with both the space and the viewer.

For a view of some of the artist's earlier work, checkout James Kalm's video walk through of a early 2011 show at Black and White Gallery.

Two Rainbows

Can you find the second rainbow? Clearly this was taken before the series of 100+ degree days, but with a little luck we might get some rainshowers this afternoon. Fingers crossed.

Coney Island

The Steeplechase, Coney Island (1929), Milton Avery

Luna Park Sign (1928), Walker Evans

Fourth of July, Coney Island (1958), Robert Frank

There might not be a steeplechase any more, but Coney Island remains essentially the same over the decades.  I loved finding these old photographs by Walker Evans and Robert Frank just for that reason. Especially at night, walking along the 100 year old boardwalk, one feels that people have been doing this here for ages.

Colored Plastic Things

The Straws on the Doors via Economy Custard

Two of my favorite photography blogs seemed to be sharing a moment as I caught up on my Google Reader today. Both posted photos of unusual collections of colored plastic on wood, and both blogs worth a gander.

David Ikus

Lydia Venieri: The Last Conflict

Can a cornucopia of fake flowers, shiny things, dolls, dolphins and unicorns escape being twee? The Lydia Venieri exhibition The Last Conflict: Retrospective: Sculpture, Video, and Photography is, as the title suggests, a mixed media installation that occupies the majority of Stux Gallery's space that begs the question.

Her bubble sculptures, supported by tree trunks or suspended from the ceiling, depict hyperbolically natural flora and fauna. The materials mix the organic (moss, wood) and plastic. The miniature ecosystems seem like the baubles of fairies from a bad production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Authenticity is hardly the point, however.

The exhibition also featured satin digital color prints from the artist's "Planet Exodus" series. In them, wide-eyed dolls pose like models.

Their large eyes reflect the manmade surroundings, and suggest a (fake?) innocence in the face of natural devastation. The worlds Venieri portrays in the dolls' eyes, and in the video installation as well, suggests the world of man in conflict with the natural world.

That message comes differently from the mouths, so to speak, of the little plastic people that Venieri employs.

Rather like a Japanese Lolita, Venieri's exhibition tweaks twee on the nose, and manages to seem coy about the darkness underlying her plastic arts.

Up through June 25th at Stux Gallery.