Laura Letinsky

MONIQUE MELOCHE GALLERY
2154 W. Division
January 16–March 13

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #2, 2008, color photograph, 32 x 40". From the series “The Dog and the Wolf,” 2008–2009.

In her first series of domestic still-life photographs (“Morning, and Melancholia,” 2002–), Laura Letinsky put the contemporary kitchen countertop and the traditions of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings under analysis, as it were, revealing them both to be purveyors of deep-seated cultural meanings. In Letinsky’s subsequent bodies of work, the white tablecloth—traditionally a sign of cleanliness and elegance—figures as a screen on which a culture’s ideas surrounding food, desire, and sustenance are projected and consumed.

Succulence and decay, desire and the sense of repulsion that often follows satiety, are competing forces in the artist’s latest exhibition, a magnificently concise selection of five large-format color photographs culled from a new series titled “The Dog and the Wolf,” 2008–2009. These grimly elegiac images, all shot in the artist’s studio during the velvety gray hours of twilight, foreground to a greater extent than before the serene abjection at the heart of Letinsky’s project without sacrificing any of the exquisitely controlled formalism for which she is known.

The artfully strewn cellophane wrappers and fast-food packaging of her 2006 series “To Say It Isn’t So” have been replaced by a dead rabbit and pigeon, a pile of scooped-out oyster shells, and various minute scraps of organic detritus placed so precisely on the table’s surface as to suggest an excavation site rather than an abandoned meal. Shot from a range of perspectives, all of them somewhat disorienting, Letinsky’s dining table no longer appears as a deserted gathering spot. Now it seems more like a precipice, its contents pushed precariously close to the edge with nowhere left to go.

— Claudine Ise

Francesca Fuchs

TEXAS GALLERY
2012 Peden Street
February 18–March 27

Francesca Fuchs, Abstract Print and Bed,
 2009, 
acrylic on canvas, 
59 3/4 x 80".

This deceptively enigmatic exhibition by Francesca Fuchs, simply titled “Paintings,” will not appease those looking for a quick read. While the ten canvases might initially come off as staid, their metaphoric import is tantalizingly tautological—a self-reflective statement on value. The questions raised by the works are both simple and stubborn and thus recall the novels of Magnus Mills. The protagonists in Mills’s stories are typically part of a maddening, self-sustaining, yet purposeless system. Similarly, Fuchs creates an existential conundrum in her show, one that implores the viewer to question profound issues via a simple apparatus.

All the works here depict paintings of paintings, and the artist’s signature washed-out pastel palette is dominant, if somewhat more painterly than in earlier works. Fuchs’s source material is culled from a mix of junk-shop kitsch paintings, which are sometimes positioned next to pictures by renowned artists. By rendering both genres in one work, she not just draws the mercurial nature of aesthetic value into focus but also, more poignantly, pulls herself into the mix. While so much contemporary art distances the maker from the viewer, these paintings expose the artist’s deep-seated questioning of worth and value within the very context of the system that is celebrating her. The fact that the exhibition is in one of Houston’s top venues only enriches the dialogue.

— Garland Fielder

“The Graphic Unconscious”

THE PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS
118-128 North Broad Street
January 29–April 11

Tromarama, Serigala Militia (detail), 2005, 402 woodcuts, video projection, woodcuts 10 x 8" each.

This ambitious five-venue exhibition brings together thirty-five artists who incorporate prints or printmaking into a wide array of styles and practices. The highlight of the exhibition (itself part of Philadelphia’s citywide festival “Philagrafika 2010”) is at Morris and Fisher Brooks Galleries at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and features Christiane Baumgartner, Mark Bradford, Orit Hofshi, Pepón Osorio, Kiki Smith, Qiu Zhijie, and the artist collective Tromarama. The show encourages a broadened definition of printmaking, one that takes into account digital reproduction technology and encompasses the use of printed matter in combined-media works.

Several of the pieces challenge the traditional notion of prints as multiples. Hofshi, for example, incorporates hand-carved pine panels along with the prints pulled from them into a large-scale sculptural installation. By including the blocks in If the Tread Is an Echo, 2009, the artist blurs the line between process and final artwork. She also precludes the possibility of an edition. Another print that would be challenging to reproduce is Osorio’s You’re Never Ready, 2009. For this piece, he used a laser printer to superimpose an X-ray of his mother’s skull onto a flattened, compressed pile of confetti. The single continuous image––printed across thousands of individual paper bits like a giant jigsaw puzzle––is a technological feat that subverts printmaking’s tradition of multiple reproductions of a single image by instead printing one image on numerous surfaces.

Also worth pointing out as an effective fusion of new media and traditional printmaking technique is Tromarama’s Serigala Militia, 2005. This stop-motion animation, projected in a small chamber, was made by filming a sequence of wooden panels that also line the exterior walls of the room. The blocks’ handmade materiality and implicit labor-intensive production enrich the slick, fast-paced video. Overall, the assimilation of prints and printmaking into a wide variety of contemporary art practices confirms the sustained relevance and versatility of this ancient medium.

— Mara Hoberman

Carey Young

MUSEUM OF ART, RISD
Rhode Island School of Design, 224 Benefit Street
October 9–April 18

Carey Young, Declared Void, 2005, vinyl drawing and text on wall, dimensions variable.

As this small show demonstrates, Carey Young has considered deeply the realm of corporate-structured business and the legalization of Western culture. In the nearly fifteen-minute video Uncertain Contract, 2008, an actor in business attire roams an empty white set while dramatizing legalese such as parties, tender, and notice—at one point furiously punching an imagined victim while repeating the word “damages.” Body Techniques (after Parallel Stress, Dennis Oppenheim, 1970), 2007, is a photograph of Young, in a business suit, resting facedown in a hollow of sand on the outskirts of an anonymous Arab boomtown. The work comments ruefully on the fate of the individual in transnational capitalist enterprises while evoking still other artistic precedents, including performance documentation of Valie Export’s 1972–76 series “Body Configurations.”

The exhibition hinges on Declared Void, 2005, a cubic space delineated by a thick black vinyl line applied to the walls and floor. Alongside it, a text declares: BY ENTERING THE ZONE CREATED BY THIS DRAWING, AND FOR THE PERIOD YOU REMAIN THERE, YOU DECLARE AND AGREE THAT THE US CONSTITUTION WILL NOT APPLY TO YOU. The contractual language imbues the emptiness with a charge that simultaneously repulses and seduces. During my visit, two men discussed the work’s implications (“Someone could come in there and strip my clothes off and beat me to a bloody pulp, I guess”) and a woman gingerly stretched her foot across the line. She withdrew it quickly and then, for the rest of her time in the gallery, skirted this seeming black hole of rights. In fact, while crafting the piece Young sought legal advice on how best to re-create the “gray area” of the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay. An irony, no doubt intended by this consistently observant artist, is the presence just above Declared Void of one of the museum’s surveillance cameras, watching over the scene below impassively.

— Brian Sholis

Wafaa Bilal

HELEN DAY ART CENTER
5 School Street
January 21–April 4

Wafaa Bilal, Chair, 2009, color photograph, 40 x 50".

Chicago-based artist Wafaa Bilal’s recent work turns the topicality of its subject matter––the horrors of war in the artist’s native Iraq, which he fled as a dissident in the run-up to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait––into a set of chilling meditations on photography and representation, outrage and loss, and the long-distance violence of technologically mediated warfare in the digital age. The ambiguous evidentiary character of the war-zone photograph––and of the stories it tells––plays an organizing role in this overtly political body of work. Chair, 2009, is a large-format image of an elaborate dollhouse reconstruction based on a scene captured in 2003 by photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg in one of Saddam Hussein’s war-ravaged palaces. The installation Samarra, 2009, allows visitors to perform the same trick for themselves: The viewfinder of a battered Pentax embedded in the gallery’s wall opens onto a dioramic re-creation of a ruined mosque interior in Fallujah, destroyed by American bombs in 2004.

Bilal is perhaps best known for his 2007 performance piece Domestic Tension, which took shape in response to the 2005 death of his brother, killed by an unmanned American Predator drone in Iraq. It is represented here by a life-size reconstruction of the ersatz bedroom the artist inhabited for thirty days at the now-closed Flatfile Galleries in Chicago. Watched round-the-clock via webcam, Bilal invited online visitors to “shoot an Iraqi” with a remote-controlled paintball gun. Some forty thousand paintballs later, the room’s paint-spattered walls and furniture bear mute witness to the sharp aim of Bilal’s provocation and the remarkable lengths he was willing to go to turn what he calls his “comfort zone” into a “conflict zone.” Silenced and stilled here, the scene takes on the hushed atmosphere of a battlefield memorial hastily erected before the end of a war.

— Alexander Keefe

Oliver Husain

ART GALLERY OF YORK UNIVERSITY (AGYU)
Accolade East Building, 4700 Keele Street
January 21–March 14

View of “Oliver Husain,” 2010.

Occupying two adjacent galleries separated by a transparent vinyl curtain, Oliver Husain’s multivalent exhibition “Hovering Proxies” mischievously refigures the boundary between subject and object. Surrounded by a tropical suburban panorama depicted in fourteen framed photographs, The Dupe’s Garden, 2010, dominates the first room. It is an open architecture delineated by sheer fabric panels, handpainted silk scarves, and a beaded curtain suspended from commercial light stands. Materially, Husain’s sensitive yet lush approach echoes the porousness of this liminal space. At the structure’s center, a pile of linked block letters cut from newspapers points to additional encrypted texts—a tangible “garden of forking paths” in the Borgesian sense—that when fully unraveled reads as a lyric poem set in an exotic locale.

Beyond the curtain, in the nearly empty second gallery, a three-and-a-half-minute silent film is projected on the narrow band of wall space above this permeable membrane. In it, the camera voyeuristically follows a number of helium balloons as they bump, meander, and hobnob around the diaphanous planes of the Garden.

Husain’s double framing of the first gallery viewed through the curtain, and the same space depicted on film but populated with his latex “proxies,” delivers a clever disjuncture. By separating the two spaces with this proverbial “fourth wall,” he stages a theatrical setup that on one level brings to mind Dan Graham’s two-way-mirror or time-delay installations, except replete with delightful indulgences, like ostrich-feather finials and the proxies’ gossipy banter recorded in snappy, interjecting subtitles. This playfulness extends to the film’s end, when Husain engages a simple parlor trick to disrupt a static portrait of the proxies huddled in the gallery. A sudden swift breeze that whips the balloons into a frenzy on-screen is simultaneously felt as two electric fans in the room are triggered on cue, thus returning us to the present but vividly inserting us in the garden, too.

— Jen Hutton