Hao Ni. Cig Tower, 2015; ash, ashtray, cigarettes, acrylic paint, wood; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Both across and within Ni’s works, past and present, finitude and immortality collide and collude; material accretions invoke layers of time, and perceptions of physical wholeness and visual cohesion shift and splinter. In the work Cig Tower (2015), one encounters a single, sculpted form that quickly dissolves into constituent parts: cigarettes, ashtrays, acrylic paint, wood. As the viewer visually deconstructs the piece, the original function of any given element—its once-defining feature, its essential raison d’être—is displaced by connotations and associations, and material meaning yields to an ambiguous being-ness.

The title Ghost Hit Wall is derived from a Mandarin Chinese expression for getting lost, and to walk among the works on view is to feel increasingly adrift within the confines of a fragmented, digressive story. One is in the midst of—what? A scene, a site, perhaps, of some happening whose precise nature is unknowable yet vaguely otherworldly and decidedly dark. Thus, in a corner of the first room, we encounter the work Njoy the Patron Saint of E Cigarettes (2015). Faceless, shapeless, and seated on a wooden chair, this foreboding figure is essentially a cascade of black fabric, its “head” wearing a crown of faux electronic cigarettes. To its left are installed two BMW E90 headlights, whose beams illuminate wafting clouds of smoke.

Hao Ni. Window IV, 2015 (detail); windows, stickers, tape, paper, spray paint on glass, acrylic paint on plastic; 48 x 60 x 10 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Indeed, as one wanders from room to room amid the recorded notes of a xylophone, one registers a quiet sense of aftermath: A broken window stands upright on the floor, surrounded by shards of glass; a wall bears pages of a musical score, the individual sheets charred and burned. The former, part of Window IV (2015), also incorporates random stickers, paint, an “Open” sign, and tape. Interestingly, the quotidian nature of the artist’s chosen materials—window frames, stickers, cigarettes—heightens a feeling of disorientation. Decontextualized and appropriated as raw material, everyday detritus both recalls the supposedly known and confronts us with the unknown; it attunes us to the fluidity of meaning and the mystery that resides in even the humblest of materials.

Hao Ni. Structure Study III, 2014 (still); video; 10:23. Courtesy of the Artist.

Elsewhere, the interplay of human senses—of seeing and hearing—informs and parallels that of tangible and intangible elements. In the gallery’s second room, one comes upon Structure Study III (2014), a video documenting a performance by the artist in Taiwan. Here, the score of the aforementioned xylophone music faces a screen on the opposite wall. The screen shows a video of the score being performed on presumably the same instrument heard throughout the gallery. Within the work, process and performance are simultaneous yet distinct, while time and space both expand and contract. The material presence of the score incarnates the ambient tones of the xylophone, the video brings the past into the present, and the music, heard even when the video is not seen, claims a disembodied freedom.

Collectively, the works in Ghost Hit Wall conjure a suggestive yet indeterminate space, one in which the raw, charged stuff of our accelerated age is seized upon and arrested in its expected course toward oblivion. In effect, Ni challenges us to a deeper engagement with what we see, feel, and hear, encouraging us to pull aside the curtain of assumptions that casts so much of life into darkness.

Hao Ni: Ghost Hit Wall is on view at Yellow Peril Gallery through July 19, 2015.

Andy Warhol. Pia Zadora, 1983; Polaroid photograph. © Andy Warhol. Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

A 2008 gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the exhibition’s 105 color and 52 black-and-white photographs hint at what the curators describe as Warhol’s “compulsive use of the medium,” both as prefatory sketch and documentary vehicle. Warhol embraced photography as early as the 1950s, when appropriated photos often served as the basis for his advertising and portrait work. The show’s images, however, date from 1970 onward, when Warhol discovered and became enamored of Polaroid’s SX-70 Big Shot camera. The resulting flood of color snapshots, a mere sampling of which are on view here, were integral to Warhol’s larger creative process. Yet seen today, and installed as they are at RISD in thought-provoking clusters, they acquire a fascination all their own as surreptitious character studies—absorbing, elusive, yet resolutely open-ended.

Wearing the guise of offhand snapshots, Warhol’s color images enact a cat-and-mouse game of obfuscation and revelation. Particularly telling is the obvious use of heavy makeup, whose implications of performance, masking, and premeditation challenge the snapshot’s connotations of candor. Thus in Maria Shriver (1978), Dorothy Blau (1982), and Pia Zadora (1983), chalky faces and red lips defy the viewer’s searching gaze. In fact the direct, unblinking stare of Warhol’s subjects, who are framed head-on in direct confrontation with the camera, is initially more withholding than revealing. “Make no mistake,” these portraits seem to say, “this is a controlled, stage-managed encounter.”

Indeed, but who is the stage manager? To a significant extent, each sitter’s presence becomes less an assertion of individual identity than an inscrutable amalgam of performance and manipulation—by the photographer as well as by the subject. The images conflate illusion and authenticity, self-possession and exploitation; wearing the depersonalizing mask of artifice, they enlist the simplest and most informal of photographic mechanisms—the instant camera—to surprisingly complex and provocative effect.

Andy Warhol. Maria Shriver, 1978; Polaroid photograph. © Andy Warhol. Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

Commenting on his subjects’ feelings about the Polaroid film shoots—and they were, in fact, formal shoots—Warhol remarked, “They like it, even though it’s painful—bright lights, the flashcubes. I try to make everybody look great.” This quote, featured prominently alongside the show’s images, acquires a pointed if ambiguous significance. In one respect, Warhol’s statement underlines the staged nature of the images; in another, it proclaims the artist’s supposedly straightforward intention in creating them. Yet, like so much else in Warhol’s life and work, the apparent invariably gives way to something deeper and darker—a sense of meaning and intent that is disconcertingly opaque.

Here, that “something” seems bound to the underlying nature of the imaged identity and, more specifically, to a sense—subtly yet cogently expressed in these portraits—that this identity is inherently fragile, premised on a needy vulnerability. In submitting to the “painful” demands of the photo shoot, Warhol’s subjects trust that the artist will “make them look great”; the artist essentially becomes the “maker” of his subjects’ visual selves, which are conjured and validated through the artist’s camera. Given this context, the portrait series Mrs. Carlo Bilotti and Daughter (1980) becomes especially interesting. Mrs. Bilotti and her adolescent daughter are framed side by side, the former wearing the ever-present heavy makeup. While the mother stares directly into the camera, the daughter, in each of the four shots, directs her gaze to some point outside the frame. Despite—or perhaps because of—her  youth, the daughter maintains a powerful integrity of self. By refusing to acknowledge the camera, the girl declares, however unconsciously, an essential personal autonomy; her presence conveys an innocent inscrutability that deflects any attempt to read her internal life.

Warhol’s Polaroid snapshots reveal a formality and degree of deliberation that are, considering the medium, subversive—the tossed-off snapshot becomes the ambiguously layered portrait; the instantaneous Polaroid records the strategically prepared sitting. Meanwhile, black-and-white images such as People on the Street (ca. 1980), captured using a 35mm camera and printed using the traditional gelatin silver process, convey both an of-the-moment immediacy and a subtle aesthetic awareness.

Andy Warhol. People on the Street, ca. 1980; gelatin silver print. © Andy Warhol. Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

Significantly, the exhibition notes that “while the Polaroids tended to turn everyone into a glamorous Warhol icon, the black-and-white images…tended to make everyone ordinary.” It is this very ordinariness that yields a striking poignancy, and the apparent absence of the artist’s hand foregrounds the sheer dynamism of his subjects. Thus in Keith Haring, Juan Dubose, and Joe Deitrich (ca. 1980), a series of three shots, the camera becomes an unobtrusive observer of life being lived, and the photograph becomes a testament to the careless youth and fleeting beauty of its subjects.

Gazing at this image, the viewer registers a sense of time collapsing, as the young men’s offhand vitality coincides with the viewer’s retrospective awareness of imminent tragedy—AIDS would claim first Dubose, then Haring, by decade’s end. This casual image thus becomes a kind of paradoxical memento mori—it recalls an irretrievable past yet exists in a pure present, one that defies both past and future. Such ambiguity is the unassuming, utterly compelling through-line of Warhol’s photographs. It is also, perhaps, the most compelling proof of the artist behind the myth.

Andy Warhol’s Photographs is on view at the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence through June 29.

Jonathan Ehrenberg, still from “The Outskirts,” video, 12 min. 43 sec. All images courtesy the artist/Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.

Jonathan Ehrenberg‘s The Outskirts conjures a world of mesmerizing, haunting, and deeply disorienting beauty. Currently on view at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, the artist’s latest video envisions a world of visual enchantment and visceral disquiet, of existential ambivalence and psychic uncertainty.

With its opening shot of a shadowed, densely wooded landscape, The Outskirts plunges us into a world that is superficially suggestive of yet atmospherically apart from our own. As the emergent strains of Timothy Andres’ score penetrate the obscurity, the camera shifts to reveal a lone male figure, his face a pallid, dimly lit mask, gazing through the surrounding tangle of tree branches. This image is succeeded by one of yet another, similarly solitary being, a creature of indeterminate nature whose hollowed-out eyes and disembodied, skull-like head are a compelling conflagration of animation and decay, vitality and death.

Jonathan Ehrenberg, still from “The Outskirts,” video, 12 min. 43 sec.

Integrating live actors and puppetry, cinematic lighting techniques and theatrical, two-dimensional settings, Ehrenberg’s video work also bears the imprint of his practice as a painter. Characters’ masks are sculpted of rich impasto surfaces and punctuated by bulging orbs (eyes) of color, while several interior shots, including a view of subtly individuated pottery, register as variations on the carefully observed still life. Further, in its overtly constructed, hand-worked imagery and macabre yet humane tone, The Outskirts recalls both the tactile, animated works of Jan Svankmajer and the evocative, stop-motion narratives of the Brothers Quay. Like those artists, Ehrenberg compels us to relinquish our hold on external “reality” and enter a realm of heightened sensation and visceral experience, a realm in which overt artifice becomes a means of accessing profound depths of feeling. In this way the protagonist’s mask, despite the immobility of its features, exudes a poignant expressivity, while the unblinking eyes increasingly, uncannily attest to a vague yet propulsive yearning.

Notably, following the moody obscurity of the opening sequence, we are subsequently cast into a scene of comparative brightness, one whose degree of illumination is both arresting and ambiguous. Here again, we encounter the solitary protagonist, though he is now revealed in full and framed against the backdrop of a distant, cliff-side town. As he looks out upon his environs through a telescope, the camera adopts a similarly telescopic gaze; thus we gain a closer look at the town in question, wherein sun-bleached adobe structures contrast with anonymous multistory towers and simply constructed houses, an architectural juxtaposition that underscores a persistent sense of geographical, spatial dislocation.

Jonathan Ehrenberg, still from “The Outskirts,” video, 12 min. 43 sec.

As the protagonist gazes out upon this landscape, he seems to be looking across not only space but also time; here positioned, quite literally, on the “outskirts” of his destination, he appears as a figure cut adrift, an individual who, like the collage-like environment of the town, exists outside of any specific place or period. This physical and temporal ambiguity is further intensified by the appearance in the scene of two additional male figures, each similarly masked, whose clothing suggests, in turn, medieval monkish garb and the unremarkable, rustic attire of the nineteenth-century farmer. Where—indeed when—are we?

We are, perhaps, everywhere and nowhere, in an eternal present composed of an uncertain past and an unknown future. Caught up in the protagonist’s surreal odyssey, we witness his unfolding journey yet increasingly experience it as our own. As Ehrenberg progressively effaces distinctions between artifice and authenticity, between past and present, we are drawn ever deeper into his vividly imagined world, one whose very inscrutability refracts the uncertain, interwoven forces of inner being and consciousness. Elliptical, quiet, muted yet intense—The Outskirts is nothing less than a delicate, incisive probing of the self.

Kathryn Parker Almanas. Vestige, 2010, from the series Pre-Existing Condition; archival pigment print; 40 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Yellow Peril Gallery, Providence, RI

Entering the first of Yellow Peril’s two rooms, the viewer encounters Bloatation (2009), one of several evocatively titled photographs displayed around the room. Though impossible to identify, the swollen, globular form—framed, still-life fashion, against a richly hued backdrop—immediately suggests some kind of gaseous, grossly distended organ. On an adjacent wall, Vestige (2010) and Sever (2009) exude an immediate, paradoxical charge. Like the other photographs on view, they register as exquisitely rendered visions of the indecipherably grotesque—repellent yet entrancing, gory yet beautiful. Vestige is redolent of carnage and bodily remains: a white, gruesomely stained drape foregrounds a motley assemblage of shredded, torn detritus. Fur? Fabric? This image, apparently so explicit, is suddenly ambiguous; its disconcerting contents seem to refract some inner morass of subliminal association and shape-shifting horror.

Almanas’s work seems to arise from and delineate the deepest, most elemental dimensions of being—silent, invisible dimensions that, here, scream forth in all their emotional, corporeal force. Significantly, Almanas refers to her photographs as “visceral tableaux,” and she entwines the conceptual and the formal, the classical and the contemporary, the intellectual and the emotional to provocative, revelatory effect. In her photographic compositions, material is not merely a means but an incarnation and formal technique is a language through which intentions and ideas come vividly to life. Similarly, the primal urgency that courses so powerfully throughout Almanas’s images is inextricable from a sly, free-spirited playfulness.

Kathryn Parker Almanas. Bloatation, 2009, from the series Pre-Existing Condition; archival pigment print; 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Yellow Peril Gallery, Providence, RI.

Given the carnal aura of the artist’s imagery, the viewer may be taken aback to learn that Almanas composes her photographs from benign, even homey, materials: jellies, fruit juices, pastry dough. As she writes in her accompanying artist’s statement: “I play with how we recognize ourselves in textures and materials…. Sweet objects, that could potentially be consumed, act as surrogate body parts. The fleshy forms lie, hang, and nestle within these explicit scenes, both seducing and disgusting the viewer.” To contemplate Almanas’s work is thus to yield to a fascinating state of persistent, provocative uncertainty, wherein visceral reaction collides and interacts with conscious reflection. The viewer is fundamentally destabilized and utterly disoriented, and the very act of looking morphs into a charged and ambiguous exchange.

Kathryn Parker Almanas. Three Systems of a Woman: Digestive, Reproductive, Nervous, 2010; sections of anatomy book pages, sections of photographs by artist, medical bandaging and materials, suturing thread; triptych, each collage 13 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Yellow Peril Gallery, Providence, RI

The show, curated by Robert P. Stack, also includes several of the artist’s finely wrought collages, displayed here in a room of their own. These small-scale works, composed of delicately sutured layers of appropriated medical illustrations, magazine pastry images, and the artist’s own photographs, are quiet revelations of material beauty and penetrating subtlety. Mesmerizing unto themselves and fascinating in their relationship to the artist’s photographs, the collages refine and intensify the artist’s inquiry into body, psyche, and the experiential implications of both. They underscore the vital integration of material and meaning, concept and form, that suffuses Almanas’s larger body of work—work that is, finally, a hypnotic concatenation of all that makes human experience so riveting, so confounding, so messily resplendent.

Kathryn Parker Almanas’s Pre-Existing Condition is on view at Yellow Peril Gallery through August 11, 2013.

Jonathan Ehrenberg, still from "The Outskirts," video, 12 min. 43 sec. All images courtesy the artist/Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.

Jonathan Ehrenberg‘s The Outskirts conjures a world of mesmerizing, haunting, and deeply disorienting beauty. Currently on view at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, the artist’s latest video envisions a world of visual enchantment and visceral disquiet, of existential ambivalence and psychic uncertainty.

With its opening shot of a shadowed, densely wooded landscape, The Outskirts plunges us into a world that is superficially suggestive of yet atmospherically apart from our own. As the emergent strains of Timothy Andres’ score penetrate the obscurity, the camera shifts to reveal a lone male figure, his face a pallid, dimly lit mask, gazing through the surrounding tangle of tree branches. This image is succeeded by one of yet another, similarly solitary being, a creature of indeterminate nature whose hollowed-out eyes and disembodied, skull-like head are a compelling conflagration of animation and decay, vitality and death.

Jonathan Ehrenberg, still from "The Outskirts," video, 12 min. 43 sec.

Integrating live actors and puppetry, cinematic lighting techniques and theatrical, two-dimensional settings, Ehrenberg’s video work also bears the imprint of his practice as a painter. Characters’ masks are sculpted of rich impasto surfaces and punctuated by bulging orbs (eyes) of color, while several interior shots, including a view of subtly individuated pottery, register as variations on the carefully observed still life. Further, in its overtly constructed, hand-worked imagery and macabre yet humane tone, The Outskirts recalls both the tactile, animated works of Jan Svankmajer and the evocative, stop-motion narratives of the Brothers Quay. Like those artists, Ehrenberg compels us to relinquish our hold on external “reality” and enter a realm of heightened sensation and visceral experience, a realm in which overt artifice becomes a means of accessing profound depths of feeling. In this way the protagonist’s mask, despite the immobility of its features, exudes a poignant expressivity, while the unblinking eyes increasingly, uncannily attest to a vague yet propulsive yearning.

Notably, following the moody obscurity of the opening sequence, we are subsequently cast into a scene of comparative brightness, one whose degree of illumination is both arresting and ambiguous. Here again, we encounter the solitary protagonist, though he is now revealed in full and framed against the backdrop of a distant, cliff-side town. As he looks out upon his environs through a telescope, the camera adopts a similarly telescopic gaze; thus we gain a closer look at the town in question, wherein sun-bleached adobe structures contrast with anonymous multistory towers and simply constructed houses, an architectural juxtaposition that underscores a persistent sense of geographical, spatial dislocation.

Jonathan Ehrenberg, still from "The Outskirts," video, 12 min. 43 sec.

As the protagonist gazes out upon this landscape, he seems to be looking across not only space but also time; here positioned, quite literally, on the “outskirts” of his destination, he appears as a figure cut adrift, an individual who, like the collage-like environment of the town, exists outside of any specific place or period. This physical and temporal ambiguity is further intensified by the appearance in the scene of two additional male figures, each similarly masked, whose clothing suggests, in turn, medieval monkish garb and the unremarkable, rustic attire of the nineteenth-century farmer. Where—indeed when—are we?

We are, perhaps, everywhere and nowhere, in an eternal present composed of an uncertain past and an unknown future. Caught up in the protagonist’s surreal odyssey, we witness his unfolding journey yet increasingly experience it as our own. As Ehrenberg progressively effaces distinctions between artifice and authenticity, between past and present, we are drawn ever deeper into his vividly imagined world, one whose very inscrutability refracts the uncertain, interwoven forces of inner being and consciousness. Elliptical, quiet, muted yet intense—The Outskirts is nothing less than a delicate, incisive probing of the self.

Jonathan Ehrenberg, The Outskirts, April 5-May 5, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York City

As the youngest artist ever to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale, Kjartansson penetrated the art world’s collective consciousness with The End–Venice in 2009. This performance piece, like so much of his subsequent work, managed to be at once playful and provocative, sly and guileless. Ensconcing himself with friend and fellow artist Pall Haukur Bjornsson in a Venetian palazzo for the Biennale’s six-month run, he proceeded to churn out one painting per day, each depicting the variously posed yet invariably Speedo-clad Bjornsson.

The resulting œuvre—144 canvases in total—alluded to diverse artistic periods and riffed on numerous painterly styles. Overtly bound to the ephemeral, irretrievable conditions of their making, the canvases made explicit the duality of temporal independence and historical specificity implicit in the material work of art. Ultimately, the works inhabited an uncertain state between autonomy and implication, and despite their elemental, antic energy, they evinced a certain lack—the viewer, knowing the paintings’ role within a larger artistic project, could scarcely help but see them as material fragments of an unreproducible whole.

The End—Venice refracted the ebb and flow—backward, forward, side-to-side—of contemporary art itself; it effectively “performed” the conditions of uncertainty, ambivalence, and contingency that inform so much art making and viewing today. The End also elucidated a particular approach to the creative act that has distinguished Kjartansson’s practice, an approach that has its roots in Icelandic history and culture. As Kjartansson has explained, “You drive through the [Icelandic] landscape, and every hill, every farm, has a story connected to it. That’s how my performance works are. I don’t believe in the idea that you have to obtain the art piece to have it—or even see the art piece. It exists as a story.”[1]

Which brings us to the artist’s recent video The Man (2010), a centerpiece of the current exhibition Ragnar Kjartansson: Song at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The notion of story, and a profound attunement to the mysteries of place and time, resonates with especial force in this work; in fact, the video further illuminates those cross-currents of past and present, individual and social, aesthetic and experiential that inform the artist’s ever-evolving body of work.

A musician as well as a visual artist, and one who studied painting before turning his attention to performance, Kjartansson infuses his multi-media works with a vitality that is visual and aural, textural and rhythmic. In The Man, music and performance, time and history, are ambiguously interwoven as the artist cedes the stage to the late bluesman Pinetop Perkins. Framing the then-ninety-six-year-old Perkins against an evocatively rural backdrop—one that immediately calls to mind a Wyeth landscape—Kjartansson observes his subject with a clear-eyed calm that is resolutely unsentimental yet profoundly humanizing.

Interestingly, the naturalness of the artist’s staging is such that the viewer only retrospectively registers the scene’s essential anachronisms: an upright piano and a microphone found standing in an overgrown field; the bluesman’s slow-moving yet determined entrance on the grassy “stage,” whose austere backdrop is an abandoned farmhouse and several overhead electrical wires. Artifice and authenticity, choreography and happenstance, seem to collapse into one another in ways that seem effortless. The result is a kind of experiential interlude, a deeply personal, utterly compelling encounter with a singular man in an ephemeral moment.

The idiosyncrasies that underlie and emerge throughout The Man reiterate and affirm Kjartansson’s attunement to the omnipresence of history and the “stories” that permeate our collective consciousness. In the video, the hollowed-out, mysterious aura of the farmhouse silently collides with the frail yet animated presence of the elderly musician; similarly, the gaping desolation suggested by the house’s glassless, darkened windows is shattered by the bluesman’s lively stream-of-consciousness rhythms and commentary.

In presenting us with Perkins, an irrepressible figure whose very presence is history incarnate, Kjartansson quietly confronts us with time’s unsentimental, even ruthless, forward march, and with our own essential entanglement in a web of shared history, individual experience, and cultural memory. Wearing profundity like a blithely tossed-on overcoat, the artist leads us, finally, into unexpectedly provocative depths.

Bill Armstrong, "Untitled (Film Noir #1433)," 2012. Chromogenic print. Courtesy the Artist and ClampArt, New York City.

Such is the effect of Film Noir, Armstrong’s latest exhibition at Chelsea’s ClampArt gallery. A continuation of the artist’s Infinity series, Film Noir represents a further distillation and deepening of the artist’s singular aesthetic. In the manner of his prior series Renaissance and Mandalas, Film Noir is characterized by dense, saturated color and blurred, suggestive form. The series also elucidates the expressive potential of Armstrong’s distinct approach to image making. Appropriating and collaging images from sources high and low, contemporary and historical, Armstrong re-photographs his material in extreme close-up, with his camera lens set at infinity. The effect is heady, surreal, yet paradoxically contingent on the materials’ of-the-world physicality.

Armstrong has written that “the experience of visual confusion, when the psyche is momentarily derailed” enables a kind of spiritual liberation and sensory receptivity that “frees us to respond emotionally” to a given work. His images induce this very confusion even as they envelop the viewer in a visceral realm of the senses; in his photographs, an impenetrable uncertainty dissolves the bonds of reason and leaves the viewer disoriented but thrillingly unfettered.

In its reiteration of these dynamics, Film Noir is a continuation of Armstrong’s earlier work; however, in its overt allusion to a cinematic world of obscurity and shadow, the series hints at a subliminal darkness absent from prior series like Mandala. Given this context, the artist’s signature use of color is particularly fascinating. In Mandala, abstractions of vibrant color and concentric form channel the aesthetics and themes of Buddhist painting; color evinces a sensorial purity that induces in the viewer a sense of experiential suspension, a state of being-in-the-moment that displaces worldly awareness.

Bill Armstrong, "Untitled (Film Noir #1414)," 2011. Chromogenic print. Courtesy the Artist and ClampArt, New York City.

In contrast, Film Noir conjures existentially stark, spiritually ambivalent terrain; otherworldly yet vaguely familiar, these images seem to visualize the dark shadings and unsettling shapes of the viewer’s own subconscious. Color, richly deployed, acquires a newly ambiguous cast, and vivid hues intimate a newly fraught uncertainty. Amid bleeding pools of color, distorted human forms appear as dislocated specters—haunted, anonymous, lost. Plunged into a saturated chromatic world, they register as dematerialized, melancholic; they become, themselves, abstractions—vulnerable, fragile forms within a relentless existential blur.

Manifesting a concomitant sense of aesthetic vitality and existential enervation, Film Noir evokes the ever-shifting rapport between and among vision, sensation, and emotion. A deepening of the artist’s implicit, ongoing inquiry into being and consciousness, the series is, for the viewer, a full-on immersion in the enigma of human experience.

“Bill Armstrong: Film Noir” is on view at ClampArt in New York from February 21 to April 6, 2013.

Adam Thorman and Laura Plageman, installation view, Pictura Gallery

Due to several recent shows on the subject, I have lately been pondering the enduring yet amorphous allure of landscape in photography.  Among the exhibitions currently on view, Pictura Gallery’s exhibition of photographs by Adam Thorman and Laura Plageman offers an especially engaging encounter with the genre. Displayed on opposite sides of the bisected space, each artist’s series—Thorman’s What Light Remains in the Absence and Laura Plageman’s Response—exudes an understated sense of grandeur and a deep and nuanced interest in the possibilities of the photographic medium.

Describing his work as “an ode to the weight of light and the presence of absence,” Thorman presents vividly captured, initially straightforward images of land, water, and plant life.  Arresting in their pristine clarity and effortless beauty, his photographs reveal a muted ambiguity upon sustained viewing.  In one image, massive coastal boulders collide with one another and the sea; the latter belies its own power by foaming quietly at the shore’s edge, while the lined, rough-hewn texture of the rocks recalls the leathery skin of some recumbent beast.  The image acquires an undertone of dormant fury, of destructive potential, inspiring in the viewer an uneasy combination of wonder and dread.

Adam Thorman, works from the series "What Light Remains in the Absence," installation view

Elsewhere, Thorman fuses a deft attunement to texture with a vibrant deployment of color to visceral, quasi-surreal effect.  In shoreline vistas, the saturated green of coastal grasses contrasts with the dull gray of sky; water-dwelling plants become tactile in their details through rich gradations of green, earthen brown, and gray.  In this way, Thorman conjures a disorienting vision of the natural world; light itself becomes an agent of uncertainty as it reveals the unutterably strange in the apparently familiar.

In fascinating counterpoint to Thorman’s images, Plageman’s photographs hover suggestively between two and three dimensions, playing provocatively with the viewer’s sense of vision and space.  In an accompanying project statement, Plageman cites her interest in photographs “both as representations and tangible objects,” and her work certainly registers a richly material presence, often seeming to project itself beyond the photographic frame.

Laura Plageman, works from the series "Response," installation view

Using a large format view camera and re-photographing prints that she has crumpled, creased, or otherwise manipulated, Plageman crafts images that contain, both literally and figuratively, multiple levels of material and meaning.  A restricted palette of greens, browns, and cream, as well as overtly organic subject matter—dense foliage, heavy grasses, unusual tree forms—foregrounds the sense of spatial uncertainty and shifting depth.  Plageman’s images essentially hide their altered condition in plain sight, incarnating the ambiguous rapport between seeing and knowing, reality and illusion.

A concentrated yet compelling glimpse of landscape photography today, the exhibition illuminates the inexhaustible formal possibilities of photography and its unique capacity to mine the mysteries of the natural world—provocative proof that medium and subject alike remain rich, untapped terrain.

Joe Deal, Kite, Chino Hills, California, 1984, from the portfolio Subdividing the Inland Basin. Gift of the artist. © The Estate of Joe Deal, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Upon entering the first gallery, the viewer is immediately enmeshed in a web of contemporary imagery whose formal and conceptual diversity offers a heady, concentrated sense of the exhibit’s open and adventurous ethos.  Just inside the entryway hang Millee Tibbs’ Self-Portrait in the Fog (2009) and Henry Wessel’s Night Walk #28 (1995).  The moody austerity of Tibbs’ image, a serene yet unsettling evocation of air and atmosphere, suggests a kind of minimalist, abstract refraction of Wessel’s image.  The latter, meanwhile, calls to mind the detached, de-peopled style of the New Topographics photographers in its stark image of a suburban house.  Yet this darkened house and its eerily illuminated, square-frame doorway yield a haunting sense of loneliness, even alienation. While the geometric precision and angular composition of Wessel’s photograph contrasts the intangible haze of Tibbs’ Self-Portrait, together, the two images exude a shared existential intensity.

Millee Tibbs, Self-Portrait in the Fog, 2009. Gift of the artist in honor of Joe Deal. © Millee Tibbs. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Moving deeper into the first gallery, one encounters Catherine Opie’s chromogenic print Football Landscape #12 (2008), a vivid, wide-angle view of a Texas high school game in progress and a telling glimpse of regional American culture. Further on, Gregory Crewdson’s alluring, large-scale ink jet Untitled (Cement Canal) (2007) conjures a mysterious world of post-industrial decay and moral isolation, while across the gallery, Doug Rickard’s #82.948842, Detroit, MI, 2009 (2010) appropriates a Google Street View image in an implicit exposé of urban poverty that serves, equally, as an indictment of societal indifference.

These images underscore what is among the show’s prevailing themes; namely, that the American landscape represents a stage for the enactment of all manner of personal and social drama, whether real or imagined. They also point to what co-curator Jan Howard, in the show’s insightful catalogue, identifies as the re-introduction of the human figure into the photographic landscape.[1] Among the exhibition’s accomplishments is its rich and nuanced illumination of the stylistic breadth and conceptual expansiveness of landscape as a genre.  As Douglas Nickel, another curator, writes, “[T]here is nothing natural or inevitable about the photographic landscape, and if we scratch the surface of the history and aesthetics leading up to it, an abundance of complexities emerges.”[2]

Lee Friedlander, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1971. Museum purchase with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

American View effectively delineates these complexities and, in so doing, reveals striking contrasts and surprising affinities between galleries and images.  In a juxtaposition typical of the exhibit’s fresh-eyed, dynamic approach, Opie and Crewdson’s quasi-narrative works are hung adjacent to Uta Barth’s hypnotically blurred abstraction Field #14 (1996).  Similarly provocative is the concept of landscape as stage that links such disparate works as Pictorialist Anne Brigam’s warm-hued self-portrait Soul of the Blasted Pine (1908) and contemporary photographer Laura McPhee’s Judy Tracking Radio-Collared Wolves from Her Yard (2004).  When seen in this formally and conceptually broad context, even the most omnipresent of images by Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, and Lee Friedlander acquire a renewed sense of immediacy and impact.

Laura McPhee, Judy Tracking Radio-Collared Wolves From Her Yard, Summer Range, H-Hook Ranch, Custer County, Idaho, 2004. Purchased with funds donated by Donald Stanon and Helen M. Danforth Acquisition Fund. © Laura McPhee. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Among the engaging displays on view is a fascinating series of post-Civil War photographs, images that not only contextualize subsequent photographic tendencies but also incarnate the interweaving of personal vision, professional intent, and social impact that recurs in much 20^th century imagery.  Often in the employ of the federal government, early photographers like William Bell and Timothy O’Sullivan set out with the practical mission of producing photographs for mapping and surveying purposes.  However, their richly-toned albumen prints frequently reveal a nuanced attunement to light, line, and form that transcend the images’ functional status.

The show cogently reveals parallels between these early and ostensibly objective images of nature and the 1970s suburban visions produced by Stephen Shore, Frank Gohlke, and other New Topographics photographers.  In the manner of their 19^th century predecessors, the New Topographics worked from a position of purported neutrality, though their photographs also bear the subtle imprint of personal vision and aesthetic intent.  Thus, in depicting not a rugged wilderness but a rapidly suburbanizing Western landscape, photographers like Lewis Baltz in Model Home, Shadow Mountain (1977), and Joe Deal in his conceptual series The Fault Zone (1981), produced images whose formal clarity and deliberate framing hint at pervasive social tensions and ambient cultural shifts.

Lewis Baltz, Model Home, Shadow Mountain, 1977, from the portfolio Nevada. Gift from the Collection of Joe Deal and Betsy Ruppa. © Lewis Baltz. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

In spite—or perhaps because—of the exhibition’s thoughtful juxtapositions and provocative insights, photography’s power as a creative medium retains an indefinable, ineffable mystery.  Interestingly, over three decades ago, Roland Barthes described photography as “an uncertain art.”[3]  As this fascinating show makes clear, Barthes’ characterization was—and remains—a profoundly apt one.

American View:  Landscape Photography 1865 to Now is on view at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design through January 13, 2013.

Malcolm Le Grice, "Berlin Horse" (1970), still from a multi-projection film

A lively, critic-to-critic dialogue published recently in The New York Times[i] left me pondering over the persistently blinkered nature of so much “digital age” discourse on film.  Moving imagery has long been implicated and explored in and across myriad cultural and creative contexts, yet the breadth, depth, and diversity of filmic practice has been, and continues to be, belied by a narrow focus on commercial trends and big-budget studio tendencies.  The result is a (mis)conception of film and digital media—two distinct yet deeply intertwined creative conduits—as somehow mutually exclusive, and of film itself as a technologically primitive and increasingly obsolete medium.

Clearly, if one measures film’s vitality by its presence at (or absence from) the multiplex, the medium appears to be rushing toward an imminent and inevitable demise.  Major studios have already indicated that they plan to phase out 35mm film, and movie theaters are now scrambling to acquire the equipment necessary for digital projection.  Yet prognostications of film’s death are predicated on an assumption that the relevance and viability of film as a medium is entirely contingent on its embrace (or rejection) by commercial movie producers and distributors.  In fact, though film may be vanishing from theaters large and small (an issue that bears its own, complex set of implications), film has since its inception been a fluid, porous medium, one whose life extends far beyond the bounds of traditional narrative moviemaking.

Absent from much popular discussion is an attunement to issues of artistic imperative and intent and, further, an acknowledgment of film’s dynamic, very-much-alive presence in the larger realm of contemporary art.  Commenting in The New York Times[ii], film critic A.O. Scott observes:

Throughout history artists have used whatever tools served their purposes and have adapted new technologies to their own creative ends [….] Long before digital seemed like a viable delivery system for theatrical exhibition, it was an alluring paintbox for adventurous and impecunious cinéastes.

This is certainly true, as from the 1960s onward, artists as diverse as Nam June Paik, Vito Acconci, and Joan Jonas deliberately explored and exploited the raw visual quality of early video, doing so in the context and service of wide-ranging aesthetic, conceptual, and political endeavors and ends.  Conversely, today, as Hollywood studios and multiplexes rapidly adopt digital-exclusive processes of production and delivery, “cinéastes” and other artists continue to excavate, manipulate, and—often unconsciously—reaffirm film’s unique aesthetic properties.

Vito Acconci, "Claim Excerpts" (1971), still from a black and white video

In a 2001 interview[iii], avant-garde luminary Nathaniel Dorsky mused:

I don’t know what it would be like to be 20-years-old now–would I buy a Bolex and start shooting film, or would I buy Final Cut Pro and a DV camera?  I don’t know.  I know that I like the alchemy of this thing that you have to load in the dark, expose to light, and process.  [With video] you can just tape and erase. With a roll of film, you know, it’s so expensive, that when you’re going push the button, it’s an existential decision.

Predictions of film’s demise–and compelling evidence to the contrary–are hardly new, and current arguments over film and digital media echo, particularly in their “either/or” tone, many earlier debates regarding film and video.  However, as A.L. Rees maintains in his book A History of Experimental Film and Video[iv], the “1970s disputes between experimental film-makers and the then new video-art movement have long abated for most artists,” and he notes that many early filmmakers of the “first underground,” among them Malcolm Le Grice and David Larcher, now actively incorporate video into their creative practice.

Similarly, many younger artists today are continuing to explore the singular materiality of film while integrating film and digital media in ways both overt and subtle.  Filmmaker Jennifer Reeves, whose hand-painted film Landfill 16 screened at the 2011 New York Film Festival, works primarily with 16mm to produce films whose richly tactile, hand-wrought quality speak to a deep sensory awareness and visually underscore her personal, political, and environmental themes.  Likewise filmmaker and animator Stephanie Maxwell, in works such as All That Remains (2006), combines techniques such as direct-on-film etching and animation with digital post-production to visually intense, psychedelic effect.

Jennifer Reeves, "Landfill 16" (2011), still from a hand-painted 16mm film

A heady sense of artistic freedom and cross-disciplinary possibility is perhaps the most salient link between and among these (and many other) artists.  Given the unprecedented porosity and fluidity of the current cultural moment, any attempt to map the recent history of film and digital art reveals not a linear progression of technological adaptation/replacement but, rather, a zigzagging backward, forward, and sideways within and across periods, techniques, and media.  Interviewed alongside Dorsky in 2001[v], the late Stan Brakhage remarked:

Here’s the miracle–despite the closing of film labs all over the country, despite the fact that many people think film almost doesn’t exist anymore except ‘in the movies’ […] there are more young people who are more purely dedicated to film as an art many times over than in the ’60s at its height.

In a sense, the fascinating, shape-shifting nature of contemporary creative activity subverts the very notion of obsolescence.  New materials and means supplement rather than supplant older media, and collisions between past and present, between formal and conceptual, yield fresh insights into the possibilities of creative form and the implications of aesthetic experience.

Film?  Digital?  Revelations await in both.

Icy and Sot, "Duel" (Tabriz, Iran)

The other day, in a somewhat drowsy effort to shake my late-summer torpor, I decided to poke around online in search of some intriguing, under-the-radar gallery shows.  Rather quickly, and despite (or perhaps because of) the aimless, unfocused nature of my ramblings, I happened upon the just-concluded show Icy and Sot: Made in Iran, which ran August 23-25 at New York’s Openhouse Gallery.

As I viewed the artists’ work, I felt my mental haze dissipating and giving way to the thrill of visual engagement that accompanies the best street art.  The artists, two brothers from the Iranian city of Tabriz known as “Icy” and “Sot” (pseudonyms, they have said, that help them to elude detection by the Iranian government), have been garnering attention for their bold, stencil-based images. Oscillating between playful irreverence and pointed political critique, their work is increasingly ubiquitous both on streets and in galleries around the world.

Employing a striking palette composed primarily of black, gray, white, and red, Icy and Sot convey a visceral sense of human vitality and an instinctive attunement to the raw, contrasting textures of social existence.  Many of their works appeared initially on the streets of Tabriz of Tehran and were subsequently replicated for gallery display, one notable example being Broken Heart, a vivid re-imagining of Bansky’s Balloon Girl.

Icy and Sot, "Broken Heart"

Radiating an ambiguous aura of both sadness and whimsy, Broken Heart implicitly acknowledges the artists’ status as inheritors of a long vibrant yet frequently suppressed strain of creative activity.  Arising from social fractures and political cracks, street art has often been characterized equally by audacious vision and material ephemerality; indeed, much graffiti-related debate now centers on whether and to what degree institutional acceptance robs street art of some essential “authenticity” or social force.  Such debate, however, seems to assume that “authenticity” can be clearly defined and, further, that street art’s significance is contingent on its means of production and dissemination—i.e., on its realization in the streets.

Icy and Sot, "Smile" (Tabriz, Iran)

Icy and Sot’s street-to-gallery migration suggests that street-born work may indeed be motivated by socio-cultural circumstances while, simultaneously, manifesting a compelling aesthetic vision that transcends context.  Certainly, in being transplanted from the street to the gallery, from the illicit “underground” to the sanctioned “establishment,” street art acquires new dimensions of import and meaning.  In a sense, though, street art only becomes more expansive and more ambiguous in its nature and scope, as it implicitly, if unintentionally, challenges received notions of its own function, form, and meaning.

A daisy chain, really, of provocative questions—this is what resulted from my encounter with Icy and Sot, and this is equally what suggests that they are artists well worth watching.

All images © Icy and Sot 2010-2012

Quay Brothers, "Street of Crocodiles".

In restless anticipation of the MoMA show Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets  (opened just last weekend on August 12), I have been re-visiting the depths of the Quays’ body of work. The show—billed as “the first presentation of the Quay Brothers’ work in all their fields of creative activity”—promises a comprehensive, considered overview of this inimitable duo’s eclectic œuvre, which encompasses not only films and video but set designs, installations, stage projections, and a variety of works on paper.  For anyone unfamiliar with the Quays, the show should provide an invaluable immersion in their extraordinarily rich creative practice.  For me, an admitted film obsessive, the attendant series of screenings should be a singular opportunity to indulge a longstanding fascination with the Quays’ cinematic work, including the seminal Street of Crocodiles (1986).

Based loosely on the Polish writer/artist Bruno Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops (1934), Crocodiles is an intoxicating mélange of live action, puppetry, and stop-motion animation.  Like so much of the Quay’s work, the film confounds descriptive distinctions between the beautiful and the repulsive, the seductive and the repellant; in fact, the world of Crocodiles is one in which aesthetic definitions are collapsed and diffused, leaving in their wake an intangible yet implacable haze of atmosphere and sensation.  What emerges is a realm of sense and substance that speaks directly to, and of, the most visceral dimensions of being and consciousness.

Quay Brothers, "Street of Crocodiles".

Crocodiles flickers to life with the image of a pallid man crossing an abandoned theatre and, by means of his own saliva, awakening the inner workings of a kinetoscope.  Cutting to the interior of this mechanical world-within-a-world, the Quays’ camera ushers us into an otherworldly sphere that is both overtly constructed and vividly organic.  Quietly yet relentlessly, this world envelops us in its hallucinatory reality, one that defines itself through a dark yet heady play of texture, shape, shadow, and light.

As the Quays’ camera glides abruptly, sharply, throughout the space, we discover a world in which the animate and the inanimate, the real and the unreal, are increasingly indistinguishable:  witness a grim yet lively dance of metal screws, or a brutal prying-open of a pocket watch, whose innards appear as bloody entrails.  Throughout the film, the mechanical is imbued with a living force, and artifice becomes the vehicle for decidedly human impulses, fears, and sensations.  Thus a puppet-boy, facilitating the proceedings with a flashlight, displays a masklike face that is somehow eerily alive; and the film’s central figure, a spindly, gaunt, puppet-man, displays pocked and rotted “flesh” and an anxious mien, both of which suggest not only physical decay but a sense of existential horror.

Quay Brothers, "Street of Crocodiles".

As Bruno Shulz once wrote, “The essence of reality is meaning.  What has no meaning is not real for us.”[i]  Through its intermingling images of life, death, vitality, and decay, Crocodiles seems to externalize the deepest, darkest realms of the subconscious; it envisions a world of beauty and terror, one that arises from and evokes human psychic reality.  The Quays have described Shulz as “the secret catalyst”[ii] of their work.  Much like Shulz, whose writing conjures a vivid realm of the senses, Crocodiles gives us a world that disorients, discombobulates, and utterly mesmerizes.  We cannot help but willingly surrender.