Recent Chelsea Photography Exhibitions: Theater, Staging, Production

Orit Raff at Julie Saul Gallery

As I am in photo printing mode–color correcting a new portfolio of work–I’m apt to look closely at photographic prints (“pixel peeping”) to see others at their craft. But when at Julie Saul Gallery, seeing Orit Raff’s show, on closer inspection, I noticed something that looked odd.

The images themselves looked intriguing: mostly home interiors, empty, as if the owners just vanished, perhaps a witness to a quiet domestic crime, absence imbued with meaning. But what is most interesting–hence the slightly odd look–is that these are not “photographs”, at all, in at least traditional meaning.

Indeed, these are carefully constructed composites made without a camera. Multiple architectural views and photo editing software were used to make these images, and Orit Raff here is the imaginary photographer, who straddles both documentary and staged photography worlds.

The rooms actually represent key moments of novels. They range from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. But in these digital times, where a computer seems to be often the only tool required for photo construction, Orit Raff makes a hybrid form, drawing from literature, image making, and stagecraft, but the results are far from ordinary: instead they capture a feeling of a place–even if that place is imagined.

Nathan Lyons at Bruce Silverstein

Next, at Bruce Silverstein, an altogether different staging: the work of Nathan Lyons.

Here, small black and white prints from 1962 to nearly the present are of street scenes, paired as diptychs, filled the gallery. Dubbing them as, “street photography,” is slightly a disservice because the work seems to harness a social and cultural landscape but also sifts through streets, finding enigmatic and thoughtful moments, worthy of pausing, like a language all its own, and to be “read” in a quiet way.

 

Its a reminder of that powerful things can come from a small print.

Jessica Todd Harper at Rick Wester Fine Art

Interior relations are the subject of Jessica Todd Harper’s photographs at Rick Wester Fine Art. With late afternoon light and domestic moments, Sarah Jessica Harper’s latest body of work, aptly titled, “The Home Stage,” seem to be stills from John Singer Sargent. Children and couples abound, the later sometimes looking exhausted, but they inhabit a mostly still world, and crystallize a modern Victoriana. Many of the photos have a light that seems to lay on the subjects and reveal them, and the result is sometimes magical yet grounded in the here-and-now.

Lorenzo Vitturi at Yossi Milo Gallery

Another version of staging is up at Yossi Milo, where the Italian photographer, with a background in set design for film, has his first American show. Using colorful sights of Ridley Road Market, an East London street market known for West African wares, the artist arranged rotting fruit or applied pigment power to found objects.

Some prints were casually pinned to the wall, printed on fabric, or were arranged in collages. But what struck me about the show is how all the various working methods employed here–college, sculpture, still life, applied work, found objects, rephotographing–seem to be informed by the actual varieties of the cacophonous market itself. In this way, the different approaches are actually multiple views that a reveal a sense of place in a fresh way.

Searingly clear fine art photographs of Christopher Williams at David Zwirner

Christopher Williams at David Zwirner

At David Zwirner is a show by Christopher Williams, who recently had a survey of his work at MoMA, “Christopher Williams: The Production of Happiness.” What draws me to his images are the dual and contradictory sense of immense clarity combined with a strange mystery. Here is no exception: there are cross sections of camera lenses; the fronts of Citroens (damaged); a chicken; as well as a printed set of books. The images are fetishistic, rendered as if for a strange Neiman-Marcus catalog, searingly clear, but are enigmatic as if tracing an unknown riddle.

Besides these photography shows, other stand out exhibitions are:

R. H. Quaytman: O Tópico, Chapter 27 at Gladstone Gallery.

Cameron Gray: GYMNASTY at Mike Weiss Gallery [No images]

Geoffrey Farmer, Boneyard, 2013 at Casey Kaplan:

Gary Simmons, Fight Night, at Metro Pictures: