Gendron Jensen: Bidden

review originally published in Southwest Contemporary (formally The Magazine)

I immediately want to speak of devotion, but I will start with the work. The pencil drawings and lithographs by Gendron Jensen at 5. Gallery (read Five Point Gallery) are gently wondrous. Titled Bidden, the solo exhibition features nine of Jensen’s works made between 1989 and 2015. For decades, Jensen has focused on precise renderings of animal bones, “relics” in his words, carefully configured and presented at immense scale in the center of clean, white paper. The light texture of Jensen’s hand frees his subjects. The forms appear appropriately ungrounded, floating in the pictorial frame.

Despite the anatomical nature of his subject matter, Jensen’s drawings feel close to abstracted. His focus is often fragments of skeletal structure that are harder to recognize: vertebrae, scapulae, and the backside of skulls, layered and stacked in sculptural arrangements and made abstract by isolation, proximity, and perspective. This formula prompts curiosity and closer looking, which in turn reveals the texture of Jensen’s linework. His lines are soft, lightly resting on the paper and with only the faintest shimmer of graphite. A number of the drawings are forty inches tall, and in frames, seem to almost equal my own height, but they are never overwhelming. Perhaps in part due to the subtlety of Jensen’s shading, their presence is ethereal.

The lithographs transform the tight swirls of Jensen’s pencil to a fine pointillist mist. The subjects of the prints float even more than the drawings, with a strange almost translucent depth. La verdaderamente (la última osa gris), which depicts a bear skull, is peculiar in how well it maintains its abstraction, despite being the most easily recognizable figure in the bunch. Decay draws unexpected lines, and the planes of the skull’s surface sink in and out, flattening when close up and finding striking dimension from a distance. There is also joy in the unknown. I stood for a long time in front of a lithograph titled dénoument, looking without the faintest recognition. Two crustacean-like relics float in the center of the creamy white paper like seashells but are also soft tissue–like with their pockmarked surfaces. Later, I walked around the gallery with the title sheet in my hand and read that these are the ear bones of a blue whale and felt a shock of glee at the discovery.

The smallest pieces in Bidden are a pair of diptychs. They picture bear relics and on first glance are the most unremarkable of all the works in the show. Each features two stacks of vertebrae, configured with flat discs upright. They are the same, the same bone in each position in both drawings. I moved on to larger pieces and then turned and looked again, this time with an eye for difference. The same, but each component individual, differences everywhere. I realize these pieces are studies and find myself considering what it really means to execute a study, to look with deep, fixed interest and reflection. We use these terms almost flippantly when describing an artistic practice (also the very word “practice” itself), but thinking of Jensen’s work brings all of these words back to their concrete meanings. Attention to relics like these, drawings like these, has been Jensen’s life’s work and vocation. Which brings me to devotion.

I am a person of divergent interests, quickly bored and with meandering curiosity. The focus of Jensen’s practice is fascinating to me, both in the mental stamina needed to devote oneself like this and what comes of such devotion. A subtext of Christianity runs through all of Jensen’s work and texts, traces of his monastic origins diverted into artistic dedication. Jensen’s work has a presence that does not clearly follow from its subject matter. It is not the presence of the animals but a sense of life in death, the transcendence of creation, even once the living thing has passed.

May 31 - July 5, 2019, 5. Gallery, Santa Fe

Interlopers

review originally published in Southwest Contemporary (formally The Magazine)

Interlopers is a show of works on paper at Evoke Contemporary that brings together eighteen artists and uses the term “works on paper” broadly, representing a wide range of media, including charcoal, chalk, ink and graphite drawings, etchings and lithographs, watercolor and oil paintings, paper sculpture, photography, and, oddly, one acrylic on canvas. Paper is the only thing that truly unites the work, and the show doesn’t shake a feeling of randomness that the title Interlopers attempts to smooth over. Despite feeling scattershot, the exhibition does find its moments in smart pairings and standout individual pieces.

A handful of works find strong companions with each other. The graininess of the black-and-white platinum/palladium photograph and fantastical styling of Beth Moon’s Flight of the Raven is a good match to the storybook feel of Aron Wiesenfeld’s pencil drawings and etching. While the young girl in Moon’s image closes her eyes as if in deep imagination, the lonely, slim-necked women of Wiesenfeld’s drawings exist in foreboding landscapes. They are fragile entities in dark worlds that are inherently dreamy and dangerous in mood—and seem to be beckoning for stories to be built around them, like illustrations or storyboards for uncomposed narratives.

The otherworldly tone established by Moon’s and Wiesenfeld’s works is thrown by the other dominant work in the front room, a series of color lithographs by Christopher Benson and Interbang Press. Occupying the wall directly across from Wiesenfeld, the scenes of New Mexico buildings feel like they could represent what is directly outside the gallery walls. Their color palette of desert browns, reds, and blues combines with the planes of the buildings to find formalness in the mundane.

The works of Jon deMartin and Bob Richardson also pair well on a shared wall; the classical style of deMartin’s studies of a hand and hood-draped head have the beautiful textural finish of chalk on toothy paper and create good contrast to Richardson’s expressive pencil sketches. Richardson’s pieces are collages, gestural and playful figures clipped from the sketchbook and pasted onto a clean white page. With multiple figures and poses overlapping, his arrangements gently abstract the shapes that make up his subjects and play with composition and perspective. Several color works share the space with deMartin’s and Richardson’s drawings, including Shely, a photo-realistic oil painting by Yigal Ozeri of a woman wearing what looks to be Israeli military drab and reclining by the ocean, and two photographs, one by Polixeni Papapertrou and the other by Tom Chambers. The photographs share the ocean backdrop and bear a similarity in their fantasy subjects but make for an awkward grouping when the room is considered together.

As one walks around the gallery, a theme begins to surface. Stephanie Inagaki’s three massive charcoal drawings of a pale-limbed woman surrounded by voluminous black hair with braids standing in as visible bones, plaited like the ornate weavings of Victorian mourning jewelry, speak to the three small pencil drawings by Brett Andrus, whose formal portrait composition balances the surrealistic elements that surround their subjects. Even hidden in a corner of the office, the strange pathos of Johan Barrios’s charcoal and watercolor, depicting a woman folded over the shoulder of a man seated in a chair, stands out. And there is more: the refined drawing of a white-haired woman by Soey Milk, Kikyz1313’s nightmarish pile of disintegrating children and hyenas—it felt to me like the body, corporeal and allegorical, wanted to become a theme. Unfortunately, a few too many outlying works scuttle any coherence. To be an interloper is to be somewhere you shouldn’t be, and while none of this work feels unfit for either the gallery or its paper surface, not all of it works well together. The title may have been a bit too apt.

April 26 - May 25, 2019, Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe

Good Morning, America

review originally published in Phroom Magazine

Two train tracks diverge in a misty woods, the grey of the sky hanging downward into the tree branches. This is the opening image of Mark Power’s Good Morning, America featuring photographs made between 2014-2018 in about 20 states. In many of these images, the photographic frame is full of the built things of America’s manufactured presence – skyscrapers, power lines, the infrastructure of bridges and overpasses  – but this is America as shot from behind. Power photographs the backs of buildings, the alleys behind the houses and under the overpass, places that are rundown and decayed, where signage is old and windows are papered over. They are wide, expansive scenes that fill both pages of the book, at times spilling further outwards in gate-folds. This America feels big, but not vital. The photographs were shot during fall, winter and spring and nearly universally capture grey skies, saturating the color palette of browns and ochers with an occasional prick of painted green. The natural world sags in the background and rarely interrupts. People are small things moving among these places creating strange tableaux.

The wide ranging images are punctuated by photographs of smaller focus, a number of them looking downward. Perhaps because of their limited subject matter, these images are more memorable to me, like the barn full of golden light and orange ping-pong balls or the lifeless cat in the plastic shopping bag in a flooded ditch. They also give the book the feeling of thematic focus. There are times when whimsical pathos jumps out at me – a Byzantine wheelchair ramp or the massive nest of tumbleweeds. Other times I find symbolism that distracts from the photographs. In the context of a book that opens with two diverging tracks and ends with an image of a house fire, the sign over a door that states “liberalism as a mental disorder” reads with a sense of panic. The beauty of each image does not override wear of viewing all this deterioration.

I can’t move past perspective when thinking about this book. Good Morning, America is part of a mighty lineage of photobooks picturing this country; I think particularly of those photographers who came to America as outsiders, arriving with a lifetime of gathered impressions. Power comments on his own faraway experience with America in his statement at the end of the book, how it shaped him and his long standing desire to explore the country. I recognize his view. I see features of this America daily, though my eyes don’t often linger in the same way because for me, it’s simply part of the fabric of this place. But it’s clear that these scenes are often missing from the way America is typically presented, which might be why Power’s images feel obvious but also unexpected; an assemblage of hidden moments and scenes that catch the eye of someone seeing beyond the vision of every polished iteration.

Good Morning, America is slow and thoughtful, but feels unbalanced and unresolved. Of course, it is also just the first volume of a planned five volume series that Power expects to continue through 2022. Mark Power invests time and patience into his projects, and he will do the same here. I make note of the title, borrowed from a long-running ABC morning show, and also a greeting for a new day.

book published by GOST Books, 2019

Out There: Terri Rolland & Jeff Krueger

originally published in Southwest Contemporary (formally The Magazine)

Out There at Gallery Fritz pairs the work of two New Mexico artists, painter Terri Rolland and sculptor Jeff Krueger. Their work naturally invites comparisons, though I did not find that the artworks themselves do much speaking to one another. Instead, the independent nature of each artist’s work leaves space for viewers to enter and create the dialogue between them, finding likeness in form and materiality. Both use clay. Krueger, a ceramicist, does this conventionally; Rolland, rather unconventionally, uses clay paint. Their forms draw more easy associations, each liking a certain weighty roundness of edges and an implied connection to the natural world. The work is arranged to appreciate the iterative qualities of each artist’s practice. The artists’ similarity in approach, a “going outside of oneself,” as stated in the press release and that inspired the show’s title, is more difficult to discern from the work itself. Regardless, Rolland’s paintings and Krueger’s ceramics rest comfortably in proximity to each other.

Rolland’s abstracted landscapes draw from the shapes of the desert but remain elastically buoyant. Her colors are transfixingly vivid in their saturation, shapes pleasingly bulbous. Clay paint and pigments create textural interest that, from a distance, lend the paintings a quality like velvet, the colors so luminous and surface so matte as to give them a soft depth. Up close, their surfaces are sometimes gritty, sometimes sparkly, making a veneer reminiscent of the finishes of plaster and adobe and feeling as Southwestern as the forms she paints. Many of her paintings are grounded by the familiar blue-sky-and-red-mountain, their hues vibrating at their fluid edges. The smaller, numbered paintings on paper are iterative, and their similar forms bounce in orientation around the pictorial frame. These sketchbook-sized paintings act as studies, though they function well in sequence. Rolland’s love of comics is readily apparent, but presenting these works together adds to a feeling of paneled progression.

I could use many of the same words to describe Krueger’s ceramic work, though with them I mean something slightly different. His shapes are also bulbous and suggestive of nature, but Krueger’s forms remind me of the microscopic. I see pollen spores or atomic models or early stages of blastulae, biological and mathematical, but so obviously shaped by a thoughtful hand. They, too, are intentionally iterative, phasing from one form to a related other. Perhaps because of their likeness to the exceptionally small, these pieces feel almost charmingly oversized despite the fact that most could be comfortably held in two hands. And something about them wants to be held, creature-like. Several pieces incorporate a utilitarian function, like a pitcher titled American Dansk that at once references dishware and that bulbousness, or an intense-looking basin with the title Baptismal for the Death Star, or shelves and shelf-like wall pieces that easily fall into the category of art while mimicking utility. The sprawling exploration of Krueger’s work can feel a bit scattered in proximity to the tightness of Rolland’s paintings, but as a whole, his body of work reads with playful coherence.

What I am left with is another element that these pieces share, something that was perhaps made more visible in their association. Both artists’ work has a quality that I can only describe as domestic, by which I mean intended to be lived with by humans. Rolland and Krueger talk about the slowness of these works, both in the process of making and in contemplating them. I feel an affinity that the works of each artist encourage, a relationship between each painting or object and the viewer. They are works to co-exist with, to look at and relate to and develop a kinship with over time.

March 29 - April 26, 2019, Gallery Fritz, Santa Fe

Japser

review originally published in The Magazine

Jasper is the first book from photographer Matthew Genitempo. While the images were made in the Ozarks, they recall an atmosphere of rural America more than they reflect a specific place. The name Jasper, too, has a particular generality: it could refer to a number of sparsely populated towns across the United States or could be a fitting name for any of the men pictured in this book. A place name, a person’s name, really it doesn’t matter. Jasper is evocative of a feeling.

The fantasy of running from society is a desire separate from the reality of living at its edges. Both are depicted here, and the tension between the two suspends Jasper in a state of stark buoyancy. The paleness of smoke or a motion blur or the whiteness of a reflection gives the black and white images a dream-like haze. We are not so much put into the world of those who inhabit these areas as we are put in the position of an outsider, one traversing and stumbling upon them. Dark ridgelines of bare trees and rolling fog become refrains between images of tangled landscapes and portraits of the men Genitempo encountered. We see the details of their rough hands and the eerie timelessness of their cobbled-together homes. They live in the places where the density of the forest ends, buildings tucked in small clearings, away but not always beyond powerlines. We hang at the edges, where the cut of a tree line indicates both wilderness and the man-made nature of that boundary. We seldom glimpse past it. Only the domestic scenes feel over an edge, resonating with isolation and anxiety.

A run-on poem by Ryan Paradiso opens the book and moves in parallel, its images foreshadowing the photographs. It is a block of text without breaks or punctuation—or at times coherent wording, evocative rather than descriptive: “This is not a story of ruin for ruin has no ghosts it is a story that ends with a waterfall deepening like two closed eyes in the throes of loss or bliss it crawls…” Though the analogy to poetry is clear, Genitempo cites poet and land surveyor Frank Stanford as inspiration. Some photo books are catalogues of images, and others read like poems. The latter rely on photographs for a special type of description that is less concerned with the agendas of singular images and exploit what is fundamental of a photobook: sequence. Like the lines of a poem, images are read cumulatively and in proximity.

In the penultimate photograph, a cascade of luminous foliage descends on the folded frame of a shirtless man pulling himself in or out of a tent. It is both gorgeous and grim, the beauty unresolving of the pain.

book published by Twin Palms, 2018

A Grocer's Orgy

review originally published in Phroom Magazine

Lucas Blalock’s work is uncomfortable. As an artist he is somewhere between photographer and sculptor, or maybe also collagist and painter. He draws with Photoshop, or cuts and clones–using the “dumb tools” in “blunt ways,” as he says. This, too, is uncomfortable. Typically, when the seams of Photoshop show we consider the work unsuccessful, but Blalock’s work is not just visible, it’s intentional. This work’s likeness to internet aesthetic is clear even if its relationship to it is not. I would argue that he’s gone past showing the labor and now is just making something new.

The photographs that Blalock largely works from have the deadened feel and color palate of late 20th century commercial photography. Images are placed on other images, collaged, erased through in line drawings, images repeated with chunks taken out of them revealing another of the same image, a little askew, right underneath–or maybe another image altogether–yet maybe not totally different from the one on top. Cloned kiwi fuzz becomes a strange mass of fur and lumps. Mundane objects stand in for other objects. Things look like other things, our pareidolic tendencies encouraged by shading and the occasional line drawing. We see where insides of the pockets are. The images are always related, and often that relationship can feel a bit cringey. It’s easy to lose track of what you’re looking at. Fingers and hotdogs, manufactured yet visceral.

A Grocer’s Orgy is a glut of images and iterations. Photographs from the entirely of Blalock career are brought together, some of which will be familiar though none exactly as you’ve seen them before. These are new versions, or different versions, at least. They overlap and find new associative page partners. The infinite shuffle of possibility. Sometimes these images and their relationships feel deceptively obvious, sometimes very opaque, like a joke that you don’t quite get. I think we often don’t know what to do with humor in artwork. Seriousness is easier.

Showing the labor somehow also increases the unreliability of these photographs, and it becomes difficult to distinguish straight images. Suddenly you are in the reverse situation of looking and looking because an image seems odd but not obviously so. I honestly can’t tell if the photograph of the partially deflated mylar Smurf balloon floating in a supermarket has been altered, though it makes me uncomfortable for the same reasons as if it had. I find myself forced to balance what I’m actually seeing with what something looks like. But I’m naturally prone to overthinking.

There’s no text in A Grocer’s Orgy. It takes the form of a perfect bound book with well-printed pages and the feeling of a high-end magazine, delivering just the right impression of distributed iteration. This is perhaps not the most desirable way to describe an art book. I assume that many would prioritize the rarified object, but A Grocer’s Orgy throws into relief a lot of reasons why photography is so annoying. Its relationship to reproduction will always be an uneven fit in an art world whose markets value scarcity and uniqueness. Add to that the conditions of Photoshop where one stops in states, and finds oneself with the possibility of endless doing and undoing. Nothing digital is ever really done when the past can be recovered. All of this is uncomfortable, but it’s also funny.

book published by Primary Information, 2018

Hypermarche – Novembre

review originally published in Phroom Magazine

Hypermarche – Novembre is the third volume from The Gould Collection, a beautifully designed series bringing together the work of writers and photographers in memory of the late photobook collector Christophe Crison. There are five poems by Michel Houellebecq and three bodies of photographic work by Motoyuki Daifu arranged in Hypermarche – Novembre. Three bodies of work that are neatly distinct if overlapping. You feel their edges. There are downward facing still-lifes of food on tables, a family in a densely packed home, and tranquil, if askew, exteriors. The still-lifes and family images feel cluttered and flattened; a personal world, messy, full and bleeding off the edges. Everything is at hodgepodge angles and pressed together, every person caught in some motion, cats and food containers, objects, consumable and not, sometimes human.

The exterior images are cool and dyed in pale colors like easter eggs, the outer wrapping to these jumbled domestic scenes. I know the cover says “Novembre” but the whole thing feels springtime to me, that bare-pre-blossom cold, the cruel part of spring that may as well be the indication of a second winter. These outside images act almost like blocks of color and intermix with the lavender and gold of the cover and pages of poetry, hued like crocuses breaking through snow. They are a respite from the disarray, despite being a little bit off as well. Leave the house to wander down a frosty street with hands balled up in pockets, eyes are slightly blurred; none of the lines are quite straight.

The golden pages where the poems by Michel Houellebecq are printed (in French, Japanese and English) leaf through the book creating intervals. The texture of these pages is something like nice stationary, also domestic but contrasting; the book’s overall tactile quality lends a fineness that the subject matter lacks. The five poems are highly visual and go together and don’t, finding tangents of internalised description as big as the universe. They overlap each other like Daifu’s photo series, but their movement from super(hyper)market to shoes on the speaker’s feet to Eucharists and embodied destinies and mornings ends with the gesture of a white curtain falling on a stage and is far more expansive. Both Daifu and Houellebecq’s voices emerge as individuals in the midst of chaotic worlds, but I find no further likeness. When paired, the sense of scale of each is confusing.

These are not images that many people would choose to view. This home is unglamorous, unarranged–or maybe arranged, the proximity of items and angles so meticulously disordered, so maybe yes, maybe no. Regardless, the result is not a fashionable haphazardness. The images feel raw and in that way they feel real, or maybe true. These are not images that many people would choose to make. When I’ve seen images like this in the past, images with this level of collection and chaos; they carry a presumption of judgment. Daifu’s images still remain in a state of self-conscious presentation, but I don’t feel judgment here, I feel ownership. This is his family, and his pride and humor and shame and melancholy, as well.

book published by The Gould Collection, 2018

Talking to myself, maybeu

Afteryou

Tuckyouin

Milky Way

review originally published in Phroom Magazine

I found Milky Way by Vincent Ferrane the first day of the NYABF and returned to it the second, enduring the brutal heat of the tiny room to look again. Three days of looking and I couldn’t buy a thing—I looked and looked, connecting with little. But for that book I stood in the stifling room filled with fetid bodies and looked again. There was something restful in those images of a woman breastfeeding her child, but also agitating, some kind of insecurity. I figured it was my own intimidation by such an untouchable level of feminine maternal beauty.

Months later a friend brought a copy to my house to show me. He is not a photobook person, and I am confused as to why he has it. It’s a gift from a long distance love, he tells me, the composition and color pallet of the photographs are a match to her abstract paintings. I think of him and the book and draw a connection to his predilection for raw, romantic images of beautiful women and fascination with degrees and modes of intimacy. These are the cornerstones of this work. Entirely without glamour, the images are most immediately fixated on the joint beauty of the woman depicted (Ferrane’s wife) and the act of nourishing her child that preoccupies her. These are layered foundational intimacies.

To look at this book is to look at her. Her beauty is unrelenting and unspoiled by the flash that at times lights her in ridged harshness.  The myriad configurations of her body and the baby’s both evoke Madonnas and deny them, the child at times just a tiny foot hanging over her lap. Outdoor views punctuate the gridded images of nighttime feedings and all are notable in their domestic ordinariness. The frequent rectilinear balance of the spaces surrounding the subjects are compositionally both sculptural and painterly. You can feel that Ferrane frequently shoots fashion.

Admiration overtakes my own insecurity, yet something remains. You can look at these images and focus on breastfeeding as a topic, strangely political in the shame put on the female body, the wide cultural demarcation of breasts as unquestionably sexual, the act of feeding a child becoming improper. Through this lens the images celebrate breastfeeding, but the tension I sense does not seem related to this. Milk drips from her nipple in close-up. She reclines in the bath, eyes closed. Our Madonna looks off into middle distance, she focuses on the task of holding her child to her breast. Her eyes squeeze closed in a pained wince of sleeplessness. Her gaze never once meets the camera.

I imagine that this partnered act of photo-making between Ferrane and his wife is part of the cadence of their marriage. She breaks concentration for a phone call, other static necessitates, but never for him. The lack of eye contact keeps the intimacy within the pairing of mother and child. The viewer, by proxy of the photographer/father, is undeniably outsider. In one image the piercing blue eye of the baby acknowledges the photographer as party, but offers no entry. The powerful connection is merely observed.

We call the trail of stars in the sky the Milky Way because of a Greek myth, the creation of our universe the unintentional spurt of milk from Hera’s breast as she pushed away the infant Heracles. In one version of this story, Zeus sneaks his mortal-born son to the breast of his divine wife while she is sleeping, allowing the child to suckle and attain the godlike attributes given by her milk. The metaphor is tempting; man takes control over a power inherently feminine, using her to create something he cannot himself. But in this book, the mother’s lack of gaze does not imply lack of consent and the photographic act proves to be one of participation. He is present for all these events, the nursing in transit, the excruciating nighttime feedings. I register a certain basal longing; the camera a way of relating to a connection that by physical necessity belongs to mother and child alone. I am aware of my own participation in the nested intimacies of witness. But she is what I will most remember in her active motherhood, child and document both, ultimately, her creation.

Book published by Libraryman