Shannon Ebner

ALTMAN SIEGEL
49 Geary Street, 4th Floor
January 7–February 13

Shannon Ebner, Leaf and Strike, 2009, chromogenic print, 8 x 12 3/8".

Shannon Ebner’s latest exhibition, “Signal Hill,” continues her semiotic adventures through photography. Here, Ebner transposes her willfully oblique hermeneutics to immaterial spaces, via a series of disparate gestures and ambiguous indices: her stark large-scale photographs, cement-block sculpture, and, most notably, photo-based wallpaper printed with the repeating phrase THE ECSTATICAL ALPHABET. Through these, she advances some familiar preoccupations, ostensibly the constructedness of language, its ephemeral materiality, and the slippage of meaning. Less overtly political than previous projects (such as the “Dead Democracy Letters” series, 2003–2005), this body of work initially unfolds as “poststructuralism for the virtual,” revisiting the sort of things one would have found in an 1980s critical-studies syllabus, jam-packed with ’70s tomes like S/Z (1970) and The Prison-House of Language (1975). But, of course, Ebner’s work requires a slow read, and her subtle games capitalize on the letter missing its mark.

A second look teases out a more personal dimension: a formal meditation on the legacy of conceptual photography, which, given the title, signals out Robert Adams, to be sure, but also the Bechers and the New Topographics. In this sense, rather than returning to slightly outmoded critical ground, the show engages an aesthetic legacy that’s propagated through certain lingering strategies, namely a theory-heavy criticality advanced through austerity and Soviet-era impassivity (with its echoes of Alphaville [1965]). Not quite a critique, Ebner’s is more an exploration of artistic genealogy, if also a somewhat melancholic acknowledgement of the possibilities foreclosed by her predecessors. Her approach is particularly evident in Leaf and Strike, 2009, a rather diminutive work tucked away unassumingly on the alphabet-covered wall. The piece pairs a photogram of an oak leaf with the icon for strike ( / ). Given the context, this simple juxtaposition can’t help but evoke the lost romance of the photographic landscape, once held as the pinnacle of the medium. The wistful gesture also provides an uncharacteristic break in Ebner’s otherwise deadpan iterations.

— Franklin Melendez

Travis Kent

SOFA GALLERY
301 E. 33rd Street #7,
January 31–February 21

Travis Kent, Spheres, 2009, color photograph, 8 1/2 x 11".

Travis Kent’s recent photographs in “Hope You’re Well,” his first solo exhibition, are devoid of irony. Though many of the images approach cliché––the back of a head against a pristine rainbow, a hipster couple kissing in the trash-laden kitchen of a house party, a crocodile in a murky swamp––the artist has avoided the critical distance necessary to qualify his photographs as aloof commentaries on his subjects.

What is ironic, however, is that Kent achieves such earnestness through the spontaneity of his approach. Each photograph is a carefully composed snapshot. This may at first seem like a contradiction––snapshots are by definition made without forethought, taken in the moment to reflect the unself-consciousness of the subject, as well as of the photographer––but Kent has chosen his compositions carefully. When something interests him visually, he takes only one picture of it, often with a simple handheld camera. The photographs in this show represent a collection of imprints of lived experience for the artist, amassed over about a year.

Though his images are sincere, they are not without humor. Spheres, 2009, offers a store shelf of crystal balls arranged and tagged with prices. This composition of potential objects for some personal spirituality, arranged by size and color for easy consumption, should work to deflate the crystals’ uniqueness. Instead, it seems that only the owner of one of these objects can impart its value. The cliché in the exhibition’s title works in the same way: How many times have we said “Hope you’re well” when we have had nothing more creative to say? It is up to the speaker and the audience to maintain the vitality of such a phrase.

— Chelsea Weathers

Liz Glynn

ANTHONY GREANEY
460 Harrison Avenue
January 8–February 13

Liz Glynn, California Surrogates for the Getty, 2009, California yard waste, trash, plaster, Victory wax, 72 x 132 x 48".

Following The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, her contribution to the New Museum’s first triennial in 2009, Liz Glynn continues to explore the fraught relationship between institutions and art objects. For her latest venture, California Surrogates for the Getty, 2009, she trawled the Dumpsters of the venerable Los Angeles institute to dig up common materials (the exhibition checklist cites “California yard waste, trash, plaster, and Victory wax”) that she repurposed to make copies of the disputed antiquities returned by the museum to Italy in 2007.

Displayed on austere steel shelves and occasionally propped on the floor, Glynn’s “surrogates” are the kind of amateur, handmade reproductions of vases, shards, and statuettes that would never make it into the revered museum. Yet by standing in for the “authenticated” artifacts now returned to their “original” home, they are partially and perversely imbued with the aura of the missing objects. In this elision, Glynn invites us to follow the “aura trail,” which might eventually lead to the realization that the Roman Empire was itself built through an endless cycle of political and cultural conquests, lootings, borrowings, and imitations. It could also point to the professional and personal reputations that irrevocably lost their aura in the protracted litigations over the rightful state and institutional ownership of the ancient objects. And it may well implicate the very gallery that represents Glynn as a one-of-a-kind creative entity for peddling aura to the contemporary art consumer.

The strength of Glynn’s installation is that it does not restitute the status of the original but actively distributes its potency among a host of contingent sites (artist, spectator, gallery, museum, and nation-state). Though the business of aura may be stronger than ever, Glynn’s “surrogates” reveal the impossibility of locating or maintaining a unique point of origin.

— Nuit Banai

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

Lauren E. Simonutti

CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY
300 W. Superior St.,
January 8–March 6

Lauren E. Simonutti, She Left a Light on but They Were Never Coming Back, 2007, toned gelatin-silver contact print, 5 x 4".

Lauren E. Simonutti’s black-and-white images depict meticulously staged representations of life as she experiences it, starring herself as the main character. In 2006, the Baltimore-based artist was diagnosed with rapid-cycling bipolar and schizoaffective disorder and since then she has lived alone, in “self-imposed isolation,” taking photographs in a house where none of the clocks tell time correctly––a house that is, for Simonutti, a haven, a stage set, a performer, and a collaborator.

Using sheets to create drapes, walls, and screens, she turns a single small corner of her home into theatrical sets and Surrealist tableaux. Peculiar arrangements of found objects—doll heads, mirrors, wooden horses, and candlesticks, for example—are transformed into charged and sometimes inscrutable personal lexica. Simonutti’s images have the vaporous appearance of nineteenth-century daguerreotypes. Her face, arms, hands, and legs are often disembodied, while doubled visages and apparitional forms make it clear that her photographs are, in some sense, playing tricks on viewers in the manner of Victorian-era spirit photography. She bleaches and tones each print in the darkroom, exaggerating shadows and eliminating contours while exacerbating an already palpable sense of dread.

The artist does not always succeed in avoiding redundancy and cliché, as an image of her bound in chains before an array of prescription medication unfortunately attests. At her best, however, Simonutti marshals familiar tropes judiciously in her portrayal of experiences that are deeply personal and profoundly misunderstood.

— Claudine Ise

Richard Rezac

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY
118 North Peoria Street
January 8–February 13

Richard Rezac, Aesop (09-06), 2009, cast Hydrocal, aluminum, dyed silk, 17 1/4 x 24 x 20 1/2".

A quirky equilibrium characterizes Richard Rezac’s sculptural abstractions. They evoke the sleek minimalism of contemporary interior design as readily as they do the curvaceous flourishes of Baroque architecture, yet they claim allegiance to neither. Although Rezac is known for a concise, poised formal rigor, his recent sculptures prove he’s a master at contrasting textures, too. Viewed at a distance, many of their surfaces appear pristine, but closer inspection reveals tiny nicks, scratches, and smudges that serve to humanize his project.

The exhibition includes preparatory drawings that offer insight into the artist’s thinking process. Study for Untitled (09-08), 2009, suggests Rezac initially had a different orientation in mind for the resulting sculpture, which—like several others on view—is oriented along a tilted vertical axis. Almost all the works in this show are affixed to the wall slightly below eye level. Aesop, 2009, however, skims the concrete floor like a small sea barge. Two crisp, diaphanous dyed silk panels are suspended from tiny aluminum girders like flags (or curtains). The structure rests atop a sliced-up chalky white capsule cast from Hydrocal (a gypsum plaster).

The use of polished aluminum and bronze in several of the sculptures allows for the play of reflectivity and opacity while bringing to mind the streamlined functionalism of high-end kitchen and bathroom fixtures. The silk, cherrywood, and Hydrocal suggest tactility and malleability, and yet the fact that silk and cherrywood are materials favored by the luxury-home-goods industry for their suggestion of richness, depth, and warmth adds a piquant fillip of irony to these works. Lyric and purposeless, the pieces are sculptural folly for the serious-minded viewer.

— Claudine Ise

Dana Frankfort

INMAN GALLERY
3901 Main Street
January 15–March 6

Dana Frankfort, COMING, 2009, oil on panel, 36 x 48".

With their bright palettes and rough rectangular forms, Dana Frankfort’s latest canvases recall early Rothko. Hovering bodies of vivid colors, applied in jagged brushstrokes, pleasurably shock the system on a gray winter day. As in her previous works, Frankfort seeks to go beyond a formal interpretation of color and form through her incorporation of various words rendered in capital letters. Ubiquitous in her work for more than a decade, they are never straightforward. Filling up the canvas from top to bottom, her words seem the equivalent of screaming at the heavens in our digital age.

The artist singles out the elastic potential of her letterforms and teases subtlety out of surprising places. Titled “PICTURES,” this exhibition explores subjective readings of words without specificity. Like Day-Glo interpretations of Color Field painting, a hazy world of emotion is all one has to contextualize HEALTH and FITNESS (all works 2009). COMING is a nearly blank white canvas, its titular word obscured to a faded hint of translucent yellow on a ground of neon orange. Many layers of color are painted beneath the surface; purples and yellows leak out at the edges of a panel mounted to a wooden frame. Frankfort shines a light on communication’s foibles here, which seem obscure even in plain sight.

— Sean Carroll

Robert Pruitt

HOOKS-EPSTEIN GALLERY
2631 Colquitt,
January 16–February 13

Robert Pruitt, Be of Our Space World, 2009, charcoal, conté crayon, mixed media, 48 x 36".

A reference to the first DC Comic to feature a black superhero, Robert Pruitt’s new exhibition, “The Forever People,” attempts to harness the attitudes of the hippie generation. Pruitt shifts conceptual gears significantly with this latest work. Here, deep yet subtle juxtapositions are coupled with heartfelt humanity. The new works’ subjects—rendered in charcoal and conté—hail from some mixed-up time and place, their poses, clothes, and attitudes reflecting fractured identities. A serene iconography sets “The Forever People” apart from the artist’s other drawings, which juxtapose American and African identities but subsume their personalities to their accoutrements. These latest drawings are given more care and real character, their countenances powerfully expressive but not caricatures.

Superbad Garveyite (all works 2009) portrays a defiant figure standing tall, his pose half Bad-era Michael Jackson, half Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, 1830. He wears a bright red shirt emblazoned with the Kongo Cosmogram, an African and Caribbean religious symbol signifying the continuity of life. An exuberantly hued painting by Sam Gilliam is creased and draped over his shoulders. Be of Our Space World focuses on the chiseled profile of a woman sitting at rigid attention. Her updo resembles Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1920, extending diagonally to a precarious height; this Constructivist reference is coupled with the new age astrological print of her loose-fitting shirt. Pruitt’s work still holds some of the acidity that propelled black radicalism into the twenty-first century, but the artist has gone on to search for harmonies among the cultural elements that capture his attention. Between Kehinde Wiley’s exalting, illustrative portraits and Michael Ray Charles’s biting historical remixes comes Pruitt’s interpretation of contemporary Americana as seen through the lens of African-American identity.

— Sean Carroll

Joseph Cohen

WADE WILSON ART
4411 Montrose Blvd.
January 8–February 13

Joseph Cohen, Proposition 135, 2009, reclaimed latex, enamel, stain, acrylic and enamel on pine, 23 x 20 x 2 1/2".

Prescriptive art can often unintentionally provoke apathy in the viewer—the adherence to a “rule-based” agenda may come across as shallow, if not didactic, pointing to self-involved interests that say little of a larger context. This is thankfully not the case in Joseph Cohen’s solo exhibition “Forging the Path of the Concrete.” His paintings are created solely from reclaimed, repurposed materials, like defective, off-color batches of paint mismixed at Home Depot, which are poured and layered onto found surfaces, suggesting oddly construed confectionery.

The fact that Cohen strictly limits his palette in such a manner fulfills both an eco-based agenda and a conservative approach to materials in general—waste not, want not. The results are oddly multifarious in their range and epic in scope. Yet the artist reveals enough of his process to come off as humble. Various stalactite-like formations give evidence of Cohen’s patient layering technique, adding a molten quality to the surface of each work. It is as though the paintings grew into the forms presented in the show, rather than having been forced into the traditional rectangle format. Although Cohen often blankets much of the final imagery in a layer of thick white, strategically exposed colorful stripes belie the serious intent behind the methodology—and that’s a good thing.

— Garland Fielder

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