Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Green 1, 2004 C-type print, 120 x 120 cm, courtesy of Flowers, London

The state of the environment – activated by observation, exploration and intervention – is the common subject taken up by eighteen photographers included in the current exhibition at Flower East. The show’s framework is intentionally broad, stretching the term ‘environment’ to encompass both urban and rural landscapes and surveying ecological, anthropological, political, architectural and aesthetic concerns. The wide berth also allows Chris Littlewood, the gallery’s Director of Photography and the show’s curator, to bring together work by heavyweight gallery artists (including Edward Burtynsky, Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Polodori) into proximity with images from a younger generation of artists.

Installation view: Andy Goldsworthy, Street Dirt-Afternoon, West 57th between 11th and 12th Avenues, New York, March 11, (detail), 2010, Suite of 22 unique inkjet prints, courtesy of Flowers, London

Installation view: Tom Lovelace, Forms in Green, Hackney 1, 2, 6 & 9, 2011, Unique photograms, 50 x 98 cm, courtesy Flowers, London

Taking over entirely the two sprawling floors of gallery space, pictures with related concerns but drastically different approaches generate a pace and balance that grounds and elevates the newer work, on one hand, while also putting the more established images into relief, suggesting both their significant legacies and the shifting energies that seem to destabilize their authority. Without a prescribed political stance or dominating aesthetic linking the work, the relationships between images feels instinctual, agile and light-hearted.

Uncommon Ground installation view

Edward Burtynsky, Rock of Ages #4, abandoned section, Adam-Pirie Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991, Chromogenic colour print, 152 x 122 cm, courtesy Flowers, London

This is especially true in the main space on the upper level, where work by Burtynsky, John Maclean and Tom Lovelace triangulate the space. In the corner, the swath of water below the sheer cliff wall in Burtynsky’s Rock of Ages, 1991 is a stunning racing green, an anchor for the room. It’s also a perfect foil for the work of John MacLean, opposite, which infuses flares of colour into the geometric rifts in snowy landscapes. 

Installation view: John MacLean, Red, Green, Blue, 2012, achival inkjet print, courtesy Flowers, London

Tom Lovelace, Forms in Green, Hackney 1, 2, 6 & 9, 2011 (detail), unique photograms, 50 x 98 cm, courtesy Flowers, London

On the longest continuous wall, Tom Lovelace’s Forms in Green, Hackney 1, 2, 6 & 9, 2011 unfolds as a sequence of fabric panels in shades of green, abstractions reminiscent of Rothko. In fact, the panels are disused notice boards from east London, faded from exposure to the sun at the edges of pinned pages now long-removed. Framed and formally displayed, they are a kind of naturally occurring abstract expressionism.

David Spero, Studio 3, Hallituskatu, 2007, C-type print 60 x 76 cm, courtesy Flowers, London

Installation view: WassinkLundgren

WassinkLundgren, Empty Bottles, 2007, C-Print 100 x 80 cm, courtesy Flowers, London

An often playful performative thread runs also through the exhibition. David Spero creates intricate constellations in otherwise banal interiors, turning our eyes into bouncing balls that track new sightlines and ways of looking. Scarlett Hooft Graafland inserts her own naked body into otherwise empty rural scenes, her form draped over Icelandic huts in the works here, adding a sense of scale and surreality to the images. The collaborative WassinglinkLundgren, by contrast, teases out a performance by unassuming passers by, who pause to collect and dispose of the empty bottles the artists have planted in Beijing and Shnaghai.

Aaron Schuman, Redwoods (2), 2011, silver gelatin fibre-based print, 30.5 x 41cm, courtesy Flowers, London

Nadav Kander, Metal Palm, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 2007, Chromogenic colour print, Edition 5, 122 x 149 cm, courtesy Flowers, London

On view until 1 September, with work by Peter Ainsworth, Edward Burtynsky, Chris Engman, Andrea Galvani, Andy Goldsworthy, Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Nadav Kander, Jason Larkin, Jaehyo Lee, Alastair Levy, Tom Lovelace, John MacLean, Robert Polidori, Simon Roberts, Aaron Schuman, Raven Smith, David Spero and WassinkLundgren.

Saul Leiter, Red Umbrella, c. 1958, Chromogenic Print, 14 x 11 inches, © Saul Leiter Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

‘It’s just too much, don’t you think?’ asks Saul Leiter as he walks around his own exhibition, on view until April 15th at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen. The video documenting Leiter’s reaction accompanies over 400 photographs and paintings that fill the soaring spaces of this re-purposed industrial complex, now a centre for contemporary art and photography. With room after room after room of images that riff on favoured themes and compositions, it’s a serious question. But it’s also part of Leiter’s characteristic modesty. After a lifetime in relative obscurity, his recent fame—following a series of shows at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, from which almost all the works come, and the Steidl publication Saul Leiter: Early Color—must be overwhelming, or at least a little bewildering.

Saul Leiter, Snow, 1960 © Saul Leiter Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter, Straw Hat, ca. 1955. © Saul Leiter, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923, and came to New York on a midnight bus at the age of 23. The city offered a new start, removed from his Jewish orthodox upbringing, and, it would seem, a lifetime of visual inspiration. Largely self-taught, his first love was painting, and his affinity not only to the movements that defined the era, abstract expressionism and colour field painting, but also to Picasso, Mondrian and Vuillard is evident in both paintings and photographs. Though the paintings are interesting in relation to the photographs, the blocks of vivid colour and flattened, geometric compositions take on a different dynamism when cropped from New York streets.

Saul Leiter, Mondrian Worker, 1954 © Saul Leiter Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter, Through Boards, ca. 1957 © Saul Leiter Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Leiter’s photographs speak not only to the dominant aesthetic concerns of the time, but also, and with arresting elegance and agility, to the newfound capacity of colour photography to depict everyday life. For Leiter, these are often literally reflections, found in urban mirrors and windows, and punctuated by recurring motifs: hats, umbrellas, shoes. These stylish accessories, which bely the rise of consumer culture, extend into Leiter’s formal work as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, and more personal images of his long-time partner and once-model Soames Bantry.

Saul Leiter, Shopping, ca. 1953 © Saul Leiter Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter, Soames Bantry, Nova, 1960 © Saul Leiter. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

While Lieter has continued make pictures, he’s resisted the trend for large scale work, and  a gallery of recent prints is only vaguely discernable as contemporary—more so by a perceptible lack of the period style that graces the earlier work. Like the photographs recently unearthed by Vivian Maier, Leiter’s work, particularly his color images from the 1950s and ‘60s, has set curators and photo-historians clambering to show his pictures and adjust the canon to accommodate his achievements. But Leiter, of course, is very much alive and involved in this process, and his humorously misanthropic personality undercuts the institutional efforts to claim him as living legend:  ‘Maybe I’ll go back to being a failure,’ he quips in one interview, ‘it was a nice time.’

Gabriel Dawe, Plexus 11, 2011, thread, thread installation, Courtesy of the Artist, Sponsored by Gutermann, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

There is a specific joy that flares when a familiar space is reanimated by art—whether it’s public sculpture appearing at a junction travelled through often, like the new fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, or something as quiet as a different postcard image on an office bulletin board—it’s a little visual jolt for a view that’s become tired.

When I first arrived at the Courtauld Institute, I was perpetually lost and in a kind of state of wonder walking up and down the Alice in Wonderland staircases, through the tiny doors and along back corridors. For someone whose schooling was mainly spent in North American institutional blocks designed, it seemed, after prison architecture, this was entirely enchanting. A decade later, the building is no longer an unfolding mystery, but the recently launched East Wing X has harnessed that sense of discovery, filling the college with art, and, at a packed private view a few weeks ago, ebullient revelers.

Heringa/ Van Kalsbeek Untitled, 2010-11, ceramics, resin, steel, cloth, porcelain, Courtesy of the artists, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

This year marks the tenth instalment of the Institute’s East Wing exhibition, a biennial show of contemporary art that invades the school’s stairwells, corridors and seminar rooms. The tradition began two decades ago when Courtauld student Joshua Compston lamented the lack of contemporary art at the Institute and sought permission to mount a small show, including work by Damien Hirst and Gilbert and George. EW has ever since offered a counterbalance to the official collection, across the arched drive on the Strand side of Somerset House, where the more famous Western half of the building houses the renowned Courtauld Gallery, and a response to the progressive research interests of the student body. The comparison is indeed hard to avoid: while the eighteenth century William Chambers architecture makes a greaceful backdrop to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces on one side, it sits in stark, though aluring, contrast to the contemporary installations. Like the Saatchi Gallery’s old County Hall site, the well-matched convergence of old and new can generate a particular brand of site-specific magic.

For twenty years, Courtauld undergraduate students have  taken up the EW gauntlet, passing down the tradition as they matriculate through their Bachelor degrees, and the exhibition has continuously grown in ambition and scale. This year some fifty students have taken on roles as curators, press officers and installers, as well as managing special events, education and sponsorship. It is an impressive collaboration, and the resulting show, including work by over forty artists from Hirst and Howard Hodgkin—nods to the original event and in celebration of this benchmark year—bursts with all that energy and enterprise.

Damien Hirst, Dome (Sanctum), 2009, hand inked photogravure on 400 gsm Velin d’Arches paper, Courtesy of Andipa Gallery, London, Photo: Stephen White, Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.

Arman, Blue Paint Tubes, 1989-90, paint tubes and perspex, Courtesy of Private Collector

This year’s curatorial theme Material Matters: The Power of the Medium is purposefully inclusive, allowing for a breadth of media from more traditional painting and sculpture to large-scale installation pieces, projections, photography and, at the launch event, performance. In the main reception, the show is introduced with Arman’s Blue Paint Tubes where materials and composition coalesce. An apt place to start, the work sits framed and hung high, an overlooking touchstone for the rest of the show, largely more recent and dynamic work. Below,  Kirsty Howe’s yarnbombing intervention kits out the institute’s permanent sculpture as Olympic mascots in swimming costumes.

Kirsty Howe, Knitting for Gold, 2012, Yarnbombing, Courtesy of the Artist, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

There’s too much work to detail all of it here, but highlights for me included both stairwell installations, graceful works falling through narrowly turning spirals. Off the main reception, Shi Jindian’s delicate blue steel wire footsteps are a distraction and a guide for those on their way up the long winding path the lecture theatre. The show’s scene-stealer, though, is Gabriel Dawe’s colourful thread installation in the back, white-washed stairwell, a shape-shifting spectrum of colour, it changes with varying light and points of view, like cascading prisms.

Shi Jindian, Footprints, 2006-2011, steel wiring, Courtesy of Contemporary by Angela Li, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

Gabriel Dawe, Plexus 11, 2011, thread, thread installation, Courtesy of the Artist, Sponsored by Gutermann, Photo: Sara Knelman, 2012.

Tucked away in the quiet corner on the top floor, a section titled Anniversary includes more sombre work that considers the slow passage of time: the material objects that mark it out symbolically, like Enzo Guaricci’s concrete balloons, or physical markers of deterioration under the weight of everyday use, like Rachel Whiteread’s Yellow Edge and Sam Belinfante’s Improvisation with Drumsticks, which look like delicately rendered lunar lanscapes.

Enzo Guaricci, Flying Means, 1998, marble powder, resin and natural colours, Courtesy the artist and Stark Projects

Sam Belinfante, Improvisation with Drumsticks IV, 2008, softground etching on paper, Courtesy of the artist

Downstairs in the zones well-trafficked by students, sparks of lighthearted wit extend moments of respite from long library sessions. Korean artist Shin Meekyong’s Soap Buddha sculptures adorn the otherwise sterile loos—an alternative to the soap dispensers, if the user can bring themselves to rub a bit off these functional icons. And, in the student café, a selection of Slinkachu photographs from the Little People Project  hang in the alcoved seating areas, restaging moments of urban life as miniature monuments, wry reflections on contemporary ambition and desire, a different food for thought.

Meekyoung Shin, Buddha Series, 2012, soap, Courtesy of the artist

Slinkachu, Animals, Lambda c-type print on Foamex, 2011, Courtesy of the Artist and Andipa Gallery, London

Slinkachu, The Last Resort, Lambda c-type print on Foamex, 2011, Courtesy of the Artist and Andipa Gallery, London

Additional work by Stephen Carly, Hugo Dalton, Dirk Dzimirsky, Rohini Devasher, Simon Edmonson, Patrick Hughes, Laura Keeble, Mung Lar Lam, Emi Miyashita, Simon Monk, Erik Sanner and Rupert Shrive, among others. Open days including exhibition tours are held on the last Saturday of every month, check the EWX site for future talks and events as they unroll in coming months.

Stan Douglas, Flame, 1947, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

To make the images for Midcentury Studio, a selection of which are at The Power Plant in Toronto until 4 March, Stan Douglas not only constructed a working period studio stocked with authentic equipment from the post-war North America that these images ‘document’, he also invented an impressively resourceful fictional character, a working photojournalist of the time, to make them. Douglas cast himself in the role, and in an extended interview with David Balzer, he talks about the photographer of these pictures in the third person, discussing the work with a distance that is disorienting and fascinating.

Installation of Stan Douglas: Entertainment at The Power Plant, Toronto, 10 December, 2011 - 4 March, 2012. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

With characteristically intensive research and attention to detail, Midcentury Studio looks at the years just after the war, 1945-51, a time still twinged with darkness and desperation, but one looking forward to the optimism of 1950s  America, when a working hack with a camera might just as easily shoot a murder victim  or a brawl to sell to the papers as he might a cricket match or a magician to run in a magazine feature or as a print advertisement. Vancouver stands in, as it does so well, as anytown, its Hollywood North reputation perfectly matched for this exercise in projection and role-play.

Stan Douglas, Cricket Pitch, 1951, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

In the curated selection at The Power Plant, the emphasis is on entertainment, as depicted by pleasures and distractions like magic tricks, carnival acts, sporting events, dancers, and the staff of a nightclub – a striking wall installation of noir-ish types with uncomfortably steady gazes. The project was in part inspired by Douglas’s engagement with images from the Black Star Collection, now housed at Ryerson University, and some of them will also be on view when the much-anticipated new Ryerson Image Centre opens next fall.

Installation of Malabar People, 1951, in Stan Douglas: Entertainment at The Power Plant, Toronto, 10 December, 2011 - 4 March, 2012. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

While there’s often only a hazy sense of the narrative contexts in which these pictures would have come to be made and helped to illustrate, there is also an incisive relationship to a longer history of photography as document – not only to the press photography of Weegee, clearly an influence, but also subtler nods to the motion studies of Edweard Muybridge, the typologies of August Sander, and even a kind of retrospective foreshadowing of the kind of images of that could have inspired Diane Arbus.

Stan Douglas, Dancer II, 1950, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

The series seems, significantly,  to be about this trajectory, suggesting the slow slide of the documentary picture. Douglas casts us back to this era of a nobler photojournalism, a stark contrast to the ubiquity and the quick and cheerful aesthetic of images on facebook and flickr. But many of the works here also suggest the duplicitous, or at least enterprising, nature of the documentary photographer, and the ease with which the captured subject can  move toward the constructed object. Like a slight of hand, unbelievable and undeniable all at once.

Stan Douglas, Rings, 1947, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

photo: Sara Knelman

The uniformity of medium at Paris Photo a few weeks later made for, by comparison, a serene environment, light and airy without the weight and clutter of sculpture, quiet in comparison to all the sparkly attention-demanding work that dominated Frieze, and cloaked by the elegantly soaring ceilings of the Grand Palais, where over a hundred photography galleries from around the world set up shop for a few days in November. Even still, the volume of work was overwhelming, and presented the same challenge of how to extract and engage with individual works amidst the disorienting repetition of aisles of white cubes.

Ostensibly a fair for historical and contemporary photography, recent work dominated the scene. New Director Julien Frydman, formerly head of Magnum in Paris, also included spotlight spaces dedicated to recent institutional acquisitions, private collections, and African photography. In addition to the encyclopedic catalogue, an expansive book Mutations: Perspectives on Photography, was also published, with an impressive roster of contributors: Simon Baker, Victor Burgin, Jean-Francois Chevrier, Regis Durand, Roxanna Marcoci, Adrian Rifkin, Allan Sekula – to name a few.

There were a lot of pictures to see. Here are a few that struck me, while I wended my way through. Many speak to some larger trends in photo practices: a return to traditional (analogue) processes; the integration of photography with painting in various ways; appropriating appropriated imagery; idiosyncratic views of everyday objects. These emphases on object-ness, uniqueness, insider references and the familiar accumulation of modern life stand in opposition to the kind of documentary, politically-engaged work that is making a resurgence, and which was less present here – though this is not surprising given the commercial priorities of the event.

One image from an installation of Matthias Olmeta’s Ambrotypes at galerie du jour agnès b.

Matthias Olmeta, Louis, 2011, Ambrotype, 33x31 cm, unique, courtesy of galerie du jour agnes b.

Also on view here, a selection of works by Malian portrait photographer Seydou Keita.

Seydou Keïta, untitled, 1952 to 1955, gelatin silver print, 1998, 180x127 cm, courtesy galerie du jour agnes b.

Double exposures layer portraits and paint splatter in work by Thibault Hazelzet at Christophe Gaillard Gallery.

Thibault Hazelzet, Soldat, 2011, C-Print sur ilfoflex monté sous diasec, 200 x 123 cm, courtesy of Galerie Christophe Gaillard.

Cindy Sherman’s film stills have been obsessively revisited by Spanish artist José Ramón Amondarain. A few of his enlarged photographs of painted copies on view at Max Estrella.

Jose Ramon Amondarain, Untitled Film Still no. 21, courtesy of Galeria Max Estrella.

Jose Ramon Amondarain, Untitled Film Still no. 6, courtesy of Galeria Max Estrella.

Georges Rousse’s surreal, trompe-l’oeil architectural interventions at Galerie RX.

Georges Rousse, Heidelberg, 2011, lambda print, 125x160 cm, courtesy of Galerie RX

Georges Rousse, Musée de l’Homme, 2011, lambda print, 125 x 160 cm, courtesy of Galerie RX.

Israeli artist Ilit Azoulay’s expansive piece The Keys archives the lost and found in an obsessively curated and digitally stitched mural-sized work on view at Andrea Meislin Gallery – a work that has been explored on this site before.

Ilit Azoulay, The Keys, 2010, archival pigment print on paper, 59 x 145.5 inches (150 x 370 cm), edition of 3, plus 2 AP, courtesy of Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York.

LED lights from household electronics flare and bleed in work by German photographer Frank Mädler at Corkin Gallery.

Frank Mädler, Achtachtunddreißig, series: Shine, 2011, analogue c-print, Diasec, 24 1/2 x 43 1/4 in. (62.23 x 109.86 cm), Ed. 8, courtesy of Corkin Gallery.

Frank Mädler, Power, series: Shine, 2011, analogue c-print, Diasec, 25 x 32 in. (63.5 x 81.28 cm), Ed. 8, courtesy of Corkin Gallery.

Grange Prize launch party, Art Gallery of Ontraio, 2011, courtesy of Art Gallery of Ontario

The prize is one of many corporate-institutional partnerships (the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize presented by The Photographer’s Gallery, for example, or Canada’s recently inaugurated Scotiabank Photography Award, founded by Ed Burtynsky, that support excellence in the arts, through both exposure and a substantial purse. In this case, the partnership is between Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), where many gathered to celebrate the launch and exhibition opening last month, and Aeroplan, a Canadian corporate sponsor whose product, travel rewards, links nicely with the Prize’s shifting international connections.

Grange Prize installation view, Art Gallery of Ontario, 2011, courtesy of Art Gallery of Ontario

But the twist is that the Grange Prize winner, who walks away with $50,000, is entirely determined by online voting.  Those who make it to the AGO can vote via dedicated computers after wandering through the exhibition—but anyone (or, more accurately, anyone with internet access and an email address) is invited to look at a gallery of selected work by each artist on the Prize website, as well as bios, statements and video interviews, and cast their vote from a computer anywhere on earth. The democratic and virtual qualities of the prize raise some interesting questions about changing institutional attitudes and the decline of the physical object—but that’s for another discussion.

This year’s jury (two Canadians and two Indians), have made it a tough choice. All four nominees are women, and all of them make work that arguably blurs the line between the documentary tradition and art photography. Though their practices and images are distinctive, they share an interest in connecting to overlooked communities, and in the social and political dimensions of making their often invisible subjects visible.

Gauri Gill (Indian), Sunita, Nirmala and Sita, from the series Balika Mela Portraits, 2003, archival pigment print, 76 x 102 cm, courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte Gallery.

Gauri Gill (Indian), Kundan Singh. Yuba City 2001, 2001, archival pigment print, 69 x 102 cm, courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte Gallery

Gauri Gill, who lives and works in New Delhi, has been making trips to marginalized communities in Western Rajasthan for over a decade. The images from this project, Notes from the Desert are largely in black and white, a choice, she says, that shifts the focus away from the vibrant textiles and jewellery that too easily attach an exotic excitement to Indian culture. The project includes spontaneous images of everyday life in these rural districts, as well as highly staged images, like the Balika Mela Portraits, posed pictures from a fair for adolescent girls. On the brink of adulthood, these young women look back at the camera with fierce defiance and a sense of self that is somehow familiar to anyone who’s been—or spent time around—a teenaged girl. A recent series of colour images, depicting images from diasporic Indian communities in the US, is slick and opulent in contrast. Titled The Americans, the series is no doubt an allusion, and perhaps an appendix, to Robert Frank’s now iconic views of his adopted country.

Elaine Stocki (Canadian), Balcony, 2009, chromogenic print, 66 x 66 cm, courtesy of the artis

Elaine Stocki’s work is also interested in issues of visibility and invisibility. Stocki’s photographs register social and political issues like class, gender and race, in sensitive and intriguing pictures of people living in the places that she has also lived—including Winnipeg and New Haven (she studied photography at Yale). Her experiences in these cities—she grew up in Winnipeg, which has the largest urban Aboriginal population in Canada—has fostered an interest in understanding how people live together, the ways communities form and function, and how individuals are included and excluded in urban environments. Stocki often seeks out subjects through classified ads, and works with them to create compositions and perspectives that seem to compress space and colour into blocks of heightened feeling. Although her images are clearly and self-consciously contrived, their surprising staging serves not to distance them emotionally, which is so often the case, but instead to heighten that connection.

Althea Thauberger (Canadian), Kandahar International Airport, 2009, digital chromogenic print, dimensions variable, courtesy of the artist

Althea Thauberger (Canadian), Ecce Homo, 2011, courtesy of the artist

Vancouver’s Althea Thauberger is not, strictly, a photographer, though she often generates photographs as part of her projects, and her work in this medium is integral to her practice.  The AGO exhibition includes a film in addition to photographs (though it is only partially represented through still images on the website). Like her fellow-nominees, Thauberger’s practice often involves infiltrating largely unseen communities. But her approach is idiosyncratic and immersive, frequently involving her subjects in the production of genuinely collaborative performances. A recent project sent her, in the tradition of official Canadian war photographers, to Afghanistan, where she worked with Canadian women serving in the Canadian military. It’s hard not to link her work to Vancouver photo-leviathan Jeff Wall, whose large-scale staged images have also pictured soldiers in Afghanistan. But Thauberger’s work is clearly interested in the spontaneity of each situation and the contingency of situations; Wall’s overriding control is pervasive. His shadow falls more heavily over Thauberger’s recent public art project, Ecce Homo, now installed as a massive photomural in a Vancouver transport hub. The imposing image relates to Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 painting Death of Marat, and calls up some of Wall’s early work, similarly indebted to large-scale history painting.

Nandini Valli (Indian), Shiva, 2008, from the series Remembering to Forget, inkjet print on archival paper, 53 x 41 cm, courtesy of the artist and Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai

Nandini Valli (Indian), The Arrival 1, 2006, from the series Definitive Reincarnate, inkjet print on archival paper, 76 x 76 cm, courtesy of the artist and Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai

Nandini Valli, who lives and works in Chennai, offers the most sumptuous images and the most formal portraits of the nominees. In contrast to Gill, she plays up the vivid colours that have come to define India in the popular imagination.  But she also relies on an emotional connection to her models, employing friends or spending long periods getting to know her subjects before photographing them. Her series Definitive Reincarnate riffs on the tradition of Indian painted calendar posters of the gods—transplanted here in often-incongruous modern-day settings—a hotel room, for example. Her portraits of school children, who she’s been visiting for years, show them in the midst of that childhood ritual of self-discovery: dressing up.  Their elaborate, sometimes warmly humorous costumes evoke the Halloween possibilities of performance and appropriated identity—somewhere between innocent fantasy and heroic aspiration. Both series suggest the fragility of the traditional Indian hero, a figure that is inevitably eroding and as it confronts the twenty-first century, globalized world.

If you happen to be in Toronto, the  Grange Prize exhibition will be on view at the AGO until November 27^th. For the rest of us, the online polls are open until October 23rd: you be the judge.

Grange Prize installation view, Art Gallery of Ontario, 2011, courtesy Art Gallery of Ontario

James Gauvreau, Really Long Lake (installation view), wood and video, courtesy 99 Gallery, photo: Jesse Milne

Though the show consciously avoids a thematic framework, the individual works (by a dozen Ontarians), gain a certain coherence here—not only in relation to each other, but to the relatively majestic space they occupy—it would be possible, you feel, wandering through the gallery, to make a bicycle tour of the exhibition itself, and the breathing room is crucial to the larger energy fields many of the pieces project.

Gareth Lichty, Enclosure, construction fencing, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

But it’s the relationship to the neighbourhood that’s most compelling, to me at least, as raw, industrial materials, some of which seem like they could have been scavenged from nearby construction zones, are here creatively re-purposed inside the gallery.

The room is anchored by James Gauvreau’s Really Long Lake, which narrows to the top of the 17-foot ceiling and incorporates a projection and a mirrored floor—a kind of meditative, rustic, fun-house.

James Gauvreau, Really Long Lake (interior), wood and video, courtesy 99 Gallery

It’s flanked by new work by Gareth Lichty, who turns vibrant orange construction fencing into minimalist vessels, and by Hamilton collective TH&B’s Transmission, an industrial radio tower topped by quietly sonic satellite dishes overgrown, seemingly organically, by a hive of burrs—a worthy follow-up to 2008’s Swarm, which generates a similar sense of electric energy and an underlying, pervasive anxiety.

TH&B, Transmission, burrs, radio tower, cable, satellite dishes, found objects, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

Surrounding wall-mounted works reinforce the sense of intensive craftsmanship and renewed interest in the art object’s meticulous construction. On the far wall, Markus Heckmann’s Reg Ex flashes neon lines that evoke the light works of Dan Flavin, but are here formed by whitewashed 2x4s mounted in vertical lines and generative animation, displacing the source of light as an external projection.

Vanessa Maltese, Wall Grid No. 2 (Studio Sculptures), wood and acrylic paint, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

On the other side of the room, the tiny, perfectly formed pieces of sculpted wood that make up Vanessa Maltese’s Wall Grid No.2 (Studio Sculptures) are a geometric counterbalance, revisiting modernist forms in the gem-like, obsessive shape of miniatures. With a similarly pared down aesthetic, Sarah Elizabeth McCaw’s suite of works pair texts like “I am not 100 percent sure we can do this” and “Everything is going to be all right” with wooden models reminiscent of broken wall clocks, with simple moving parts: completely mesmerizing exercises in futility.

Sarah Elizabeth McCaw, I Am Not 100 Percent Sure We Can Do This, wood, acrylic and motor, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

The first and last piece you see in the space is a panoramic painting by Toronto-based Gillian Iles, Eden is Tempting but Not to be Trusted, a vibrant canvas that foretells and reflects the restless imagination and sense of absurdity in the room.

It’s worth a spin.

Gillian Iles, Eden is Tempting but Not to be Trusted, oil, acrylic and pastel on canvas, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

With additional work by Wrik Mead, Keith Bently, Tom Ngo and Scott Eunson. Art Spin’s Second Annual Exhibition at 99 Gallery is on view Tuesday to Saturday, noon to five, until September 24^th.

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying

In the yellow haze of the sun

Recent contemporary photography, particularly examples frequenting the walls of major museums, often seems drained of political poignancy, given over instead to aesthetic and commercial concerns: epic scale, vivid color, and the elastic potential of digital manipulations. But if the traditional—and vital—imperatives of documentary photography have been superseded by the tropes of high art, a compelling show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art rethinks the terms of this transformation.

Laurie Simmons (American, born 1949) Walking Gun, 1991 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1998 (1998.440) © Laurie Simmons

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection is on view in the Met’s dedicated space for modern photography, a short walk from the snaking lines of viewers patiently waiting for a turn in the dramatically presented Alexander McQueen exhibition. As Associate Curator Douglas Eklund writes in the introductory text, the 25 pictures gathered together represent the first time this space has engaged directly with the state of the world, our ‘culture at large’. But this is a show as much about the state of the medium, and about the commitment of the museum to represent the diversity of photographic practices. All of the pictures here have been made in the last three decades, and many of them are recent acquisitions.

Hans Haacke (German, born 1936) Thank You, Paine Webber, 1979 Gelatin silver print and chromogenic print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010 (2010.416a, b) © Hans Haacke

The show juxtaposes more obviously politically potent work from the era of the culture wars with more recent conceptual work. The appropriated and re-configured text and images from a corporate annual report in Hans Haacke’s Thank You, Paine Webber, 1979, points to the absurdly feeble attempts of corporate America to sooth its collective conscience, and the constructed, surreal violence of Laurie Simmon’s Walking Gun, 1991, calls up an active resistance to gender inequality that is strikingly powerful if somehow also nostalgic for a time when such imagery felt more like a loaded gun.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Moyra Davey’s Copperhead Grid, 1990, anchors the room, ten neat rows showing the decaying surfaces of American pennies, an elegy for the economy.

Adjacent to it, an early Jeff Wall, The Storyteller, 1986, sits casting its signature glow in the corner. Despite its contextual relevance here—it shows a group of Vancouver’s down and out gathered by a looming overpass—it is still a kind of elephant in the room, edging out some of the work around it by sheer girth, and foretelling the waning of the artist’s own political interest and the general shift in tone his brand of ‘museum’ photography has led.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

But the show also offers the possibility of a sea change, or at least a subtly altered, more socially engaged institutional perspective on recent work.

The state of war and US military strategy is the subject of two very different pieces. Trevor Paglen’s work uses sophisticated technology to track covert American military activity, often resulting in abstractions of captured light—in this case, KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 186), 2008, shows a streaking satellite purportedly on a reconnaissance mission somewhere above Yosemite. A recent work by An My Lê, in contrast, shows detailed images of its titled subject, Suez Canal Transit, U.S.S. Dwight Eisenhower, Egypt, 2009, that invite close examination. Sequence and perspective, however, are intentionally confused, destabilizing any feeling of a fixed point of view.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

On the wall opposite, one of James Casebere’s meticulously photographed cardboard constructions has never seemed so fragile or so perfectly chosen a subject. In this model, Landscape with Houses (Duchess County, NY) #1, 2009, shows a complex of suburban dream-houses, the likes of which we have seen vanished in the recent housing market collapse.

James Casebere (American, born 1953) Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1, 2009 Chromogenic print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2011 © James Casebere

Like the repetition of Davey’s pennies and these rows and rows of houses, and despite the inevitable encroaching visual power of each piece on one another, the pictures in this room undeniably gather force together. The gallery space is occupied by their collective energy: violence, decay, suspicion, and the slow-burning failure of late capitalism.

A constellation of images by Wolfgang Tillmans (who was involved in their arrangement), including a sleeping baby and Shanghai’s TV tower, ends the show in a glittering attempt at restoring some meaningful connection to the alienated world pictured in the surrounding room.

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, born 1968) Oriental Pearl, 2009 Inkjet print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010 Image courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York © Wolfgang Tillmans

As in the three-verse Neil Young song it invokes, the idyllic past and dystopian present conjures an irrevocable passage that leaves space only for a dream of a possible future.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection also includes work by Gretchen Bender, Philip-Lorca diCorica, Robert Gober, Katy Grannan, Curtis Mann, Adrian Piper, and Christopher Williams. It is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until January 2, 2012.

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

A room filled with a new series of distinct wall works, Hypoxia 1-6 (all 2011) can seem overwhelming at first. Each piece is a mess of metal tubing, cables, motors, microphones, amplifiers and compressors that activate expandable balloons covered in brightly colored braided sleeving. But as you walk around the room, moving between one work and the next, the distinctive intricacies of each individual piece draw you in, each one a separate atmosphere responding to your physical presence with subtle noises and gestures. The contrast between the industrial materials and the sounds, like birdcalls and rustling wilderness, evoke an untamed landscape, and blur the line between the opposing forces of the natural and the mechanical.

Montreal artist Jean-Pierre Gauthier is known for his captivating, often charming kinetic sculptures, for which he won Canada’s prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2004. For this solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, Gauthier has created a synesthetic experience. His laid-bare approach – a part of the experience of these pieces is being able to watch each sound as it is formed – turns the often hidden technology of sound art into an integrated experience, in which the action of the visual plane disperses seamlessly into the soundscape it generates.

There is something decidedly primal and heaving about these sculptures, especially in the movements and forms of the inflatable pieces, which lend the room a faintly sexual charge. Despite the obviously methodical and painstaking construction of each work, they retain a sense of the unrehearsed and spontaneous – with the freedoms and the perils of that state.

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

In the adjacent gallery, Thorax, 2010, integrates a number of similar works into a single installation, each element connected and controlled by a central computer dangling precariously like the mothership in the centre of the room. The effect of this piece is more menacing, with sound building slowly to a cacophonous climax. It is a portentous, almost threatening installation, but it’s also seductive, like watching a storm come in. Thorax might benefit from a more isolated situation – as sound bleeds between these two rooms and becomes at times impossible to untangle.

Gauthier’s new work is decidedly more ominous and less whimsical than some of the artist’s earlier pieces, like the drawing machine, Le Son de Choses, 2004, that is on view downstairs.

The exception is Sweeping Spirals, 2008-2011, which acts as a Fantasia-like gateway between the street and the central gallery spaces. Here, two broom heads dance on extended, multi-sectioned, dislocated red handles. As the brooms dance around the space, they ineffectually shift and poke at the debris on the floor beneath them – apparently left over from the actual installation – snipped ends of industrial plastic ties; colored thread; drywall dust.

The choreographed movements are beautiful, even mesmerizing; the rhythms of contemporary dancers reenacted as puppetry. Like all of the new work here, though, they have moods that keep you guessing – changing registers fluidly from acute frenzy to crouching anticipation.