©Sarah Greenberger Rafferty
This weekend I decided to hit up some photo shows that my Crit and Theory professor suggested I see. The goal was to hit up LES then Chelsea then the Upper East Side. Galleries: Rachel Uffner, Wild Project, Julie Saul, Aperture, Gagosian and the Whitney. Well, it didn’t exactly go as planned. The Lower East Side went smoothly. I saw Sarah Greenberger Rafferty’s show “Tears”, a body of manipulated images. Her process is as follows; she dripped water on digital printouts (of comedians) in order to manipulate the inks. After the manipulation was finished, she scanned and reprinted. The outcome is a twisted image, almost clown-like in effect. It’s a neat idea, which hearkens back to the early pictorialists like Frank Eugene.
The second gallery I hit up was the Wild Project. It had another process-oriented photo show on display, Wildlife Analysis by Brian Graf. Instead of manipulating the print, Graf sandwiched fogged color film onto his black and white images in order to create an ethereal feel to his photos of New Jersey. After experiencing both these artists, I began to think a theme was beginning to emerge. Finding ways to manipulate imagery without photoshop? A tribute to older ways of manipulating? I decided to make a move to Chelsea in order to see if this trend is in all the galleries.
©Sarah Anne Johnson
Ok, this is when things did not go as planned. The intention was to see only two shows in Chelsea, well, that proved to be damn near impossible. As soon as I entered the building where the Julie Saul Gallery was located, I was distracted. I kept passing gallery spaces that looked interesting. More about that in a bit. First, I must talk about Sarah Anne Johnson’s show, House on Fire at Julie Saul. When I walked in, I thought it was a group show. I saw photography (of sorts) sculptures and a big dollhouse. The photos seemed to be a mixture of photography and drawing. Sarah Anne Johnson took photos of people and created new scenes by adding drawing or painting them. Painting out bits, adding in bits. The images took on new form and reminded me of my high school years and how I would black out teeth or fill in objects for laughs. Again, “traditional” manipulation is in full force. Then I saw the doll house. It had a familiar look to the images on the walls, and I quickly found out that all the pieces in the show are, in fact, hers. That impressed me greatly. The dollhouse was the most intriguing piece in the show. Every room had been changed to have it’s own environment. It was fun to peer into the little windows and experience each clever layout. That was the most successful piece in the room, in my opinion. The show was extremely eye-opening for me. It showed me that I don’t have to limit myself to 2-D work as I pursue photography. Sometimes, ideas are expressed more successfully when different mediums are represented.
Moving on……
As I was leaving the 535 building I happened upon a couple other galleries. First was the Yancey Richardson Gallery. Hellen van Meene’s portraits of teens and children were in the main gallery. They were intriguing in a “The Shining” sort of way. However, the most interesting work on display in the gallery was in the small project space in the back. The work of Esko Mannikko entitled Organized Freedom was an experience in detail, color and geometry that made me want to just walk into the images. The work gave a strong painterly feeling with no manipulation of any kind. Maybe he is onto something, or maybe I was just relieved to see a photographer achieve this after my previous experiences that day.
After that, I stopped in at Miyako Yoshinaga, Pace Wildsenstein (very cool topographical installations), Priska C. Juschka (cool pig pirate ship….arrrgh!), and Aperture. I highly suggest stopping by Aperture to see the New Dutch Landscape exhibition. It’s all about the Dutch these days. After the Aperture stop, I decided that I was in image overload and headed off to have a beer and try to process all I had seen. The Whitney and the Gagosian will have to wait until another day.