Do Ho Suh. Rubbing/Loving Project, 348 West 22nd Street, Apt. A, New York, NY 10011, 2013-14; installation view, Drawings, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

The installation within the gallery space represents the original layout of the apartment; the floor rubbing is set on a plinth in the middle of the room, and the deconstructed rubbings of walls and appliances are tacked up on their corresponding walls by hundreds of red-tipped pins. The only element that conjures its true three-dimensionality is the rubbing of an exterior-facing wall. Recording two windows and an air conditioner, these drawings are mounted on the back of a plaster cast of the building’s exterior. Blocking the gallery’s entrance, this white monolith provides a point of transition from the colorful three-dimensional world outside the gallery to the flat, monochrome installation inside.

Do Ho Suh. Rubbing/Loving Project, 348 West 22nd Street, Apt. A, New York, NY 10011, 2013-14; installation view, Drawings, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

Despite the similarities to Suh’s previous work, in which he models architectural spaces in transparent fabric, the technique used to create Rubbing/Loving Project adds a new level of personal touch. To produce this work, Suh and his team had to physically handle every surface of the apartment, including those that were perhaps overlooked when the apartment was occupied, as if Suh was trying to commit every inch of his former apartment to memory. The result is a kind of skeleton of a place that must have once held many memories for the artist, and every part of it bears testimony to his touch. In an era in which social media and reality television has rendered public much of private life, Suh himself is allowing us to experience the most personal of spaces—his home.

Do Ho Suh. Rubbing/Loving Project, 348 West 22nd Street, Apt. A, New York, NY 10011, 2013-14; installation view, Drawings, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

The physical touch of the artist is present in every stroke of colored pencil, yet the end result is more sterile than Suh’s previous work. Absent the diaphanous fabric that lends his more well-known works an otherworldly feeling of life and movement, the rubbings seem cartoonish, possessing the surreal feeling of a life-size architect’s blueprint. The room is lifeless, devoid of the trappings of human existence and reduced to its most basic physical elements. Viewers’ efforts to truly experience the personal space of the artist are thwarted, which is perhaps the point of Suh’s project. In committing the apartment to memory through this labor of love, he also manages to strip it of any meaning, both protecting it from and preparing it for consumption by a public with an insatiable appetite for glimpses of the private activities of established artists. Suh’s work allows the viewer to inhabit his apartment, but in doing so he denies the pleasure of a true glimpse into his life.

Do Ho Suh: Rubbing/Loving is on view at Lehmann Maupin through October 25, 2014.

Natasha Rosenblatt lives in New York City, where she is a Masters student in Columbia University’s Modern Art: Critical & Curatorial Studies program. Originally from Berkeley, California, she received her B.A. in Art History from Barnard College.

Alex Prager. Face in the Crowd, 2013; installation view, Lehmann Maupin, New York City. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin.

Prager’s lens positions Los Angeles as uncanny valley: a place where reality is never for certain and real life is infected by the cinematic. I am reminded of the audition scene in David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive, where Naomi Watts’ character Betty says her heavily scripted lines in a terrifyingly convincing manner, a way we’ve never heard her speak before, even when she was participating in the film’s version of “real life.” For Lynch, as well as for Prager, the script becomes reality as reality becomes the script—or it ceases to matter which is which. This transmutation is uncontrollable and therefore terrifying, and we are sent on a spiraling trip toward a non-place.

As a harbinger of this weird spin, Prager’s film begins with a unibrowed man describing a recurring nightmare about falling off the edge of a cliff. The “man” happens to be Tyson Ritter (recognizable to millennials as the lead singer of pop-punk band The All-American Rejects), inspiring another twinge of uncanny recognition. This is the most compelling aspect of the uncanny, whose dark force Prager harnesses expertly—this edge of the cliff, this excess. The uncanny lingers in those moments where there is too much—the signifier overflows, bleeds onto something else, or bleeds out.

Prager’s narrative charts a woman in trouble (1). In each photograph, as those around her are immersed in the scene, a woman looks upward, subtly illuminated to stand out amid a flurry of movement. Her glance upward is an appeal, a transcendence of the everyday, a realization or daydream that disrupts the concentration (and therefore the reality) of the moving crowd. Prager hired Hollywood actress Elizabeth Banks as the protagonist of her film, and Banks’ face appears as a beacon of familiarity, the perfect culturally relatable archetype of the “troubled woman.”

Alex Prager. Crowd #5 (Washington Square West), 2013; archival pigment print; 59.5 x 72 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin.

In a photograph of the busy foyer of a theater, a woman peers open-mouthed through a pair of opera glasses as if toward an unseen balcony that I, the viewer, am standing on. I know she is watching me watch her. I am effectively “made” by this woman; she finds me out, disrupting the security of my anonymous gaze and awarding me my identity as spectator. In Prager’s film, Elizabeth Banks looks through a window onto a busy street; we then see her move through the crowd as the camera peers out of this same window. The frame of the window becomes another psychic terror. As a secondary portal to the frame of the camera, it renders the scene even faker and more dreamlike; anything could suddenly appear beyond its pane.

Portals such as the opera glasses and the window taint the viewer’s participation in Prager’s work with the specter of surveillance. Thanks to Prager’s elaborate stylization, familiar human interactions appear alien, illuminating a double conspiracy highlighted by the women that gaze upward. Not only are these crowds being watched—they are, in fact, designed to be watched.

The paranoia of a “reality that has been staged” is a fairly basic conspiracy theory, but it is the uncanny emotional depth and shrewd direction by Prager that make this particular work feel so eerie. Prager’s film is dramatically scored, and a vibrant red “THE END” flashes down a very old-cinema black hole to mark the narrative’s final moment. Prager’s work pays homage to the giant mechanism of “cinema”; the way in which cinema as an ideal not only produces culture but (perhaps in the largest conspiracy of all) manipulates our understanding of continuity, of empathy, of loneliness and of catharsis.

A Face in the Crowd is on view at Lehmann Maupin through February 22, 2014.

Emin’s current solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, I Followed You To The Sun, features work in mediums that we’ve come to associate with her: small, square, painted canvases of figures in coitus; an extensive collection of figure drawings in gouache on paper; a gratuitous neon installation of the exhibition’s title in her handwriting. The collection is punctuated by a series of new bronze sculptures developed during her residency at Louise Bourgeois’ Long Island foundry.

Tracey Emin, I Followed You To The Sun, neon, 22.4 x 72 inches. 2013. Image courtesy of Lehmann Maupin and the artist.

Emin’s Lonely Chair drawings series is a repetitive study of her own figure in the same hunched position, taken from a photograph of herself in France. Emins also draws similar self-portraits of slouched figures in chairs in monoprint on personalized stationary from her own Paris address. These stationary portraits are an acknowledgement of the weight of her presence as a “famous artist” and foreground her own primacy as a subject. The stationary is another way of signing her work, affording the prints a ring of authenticity, but it also makes her drawings seem quotidian, commonplace—just scrap materials from her studio practice.

So much of Emin’s work in this show is about this kind of harried repetition. Emin draws the same pose over and over again with a kind of aggressive, slight variation. Each scrawled drawing bears a revealing title that, in true Emin style, reads like a Linkin Park song title: “Just a Brocken Moment” [sic], “More Tears & Tears,” “Away From Myself.” Each drawing contains small moments of depressive aggression where her face or figure have been scribbled over or lost. Looking at the work hurts, because I understand the weight of desperate and pathetic gestures—as if there’s nothing else to do but to draw this same thing even though I’m so sick of myself. 

Tracey Emin, Thats how you make me Feel, monoprint and pen on paper, 11.77 x 8.07 inches, 2012. Image courtesy of Lehmann Maupin and the artist.

Displayed along a long wooden table in Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea location are slabs of whitened bronze featuring prostrated versions of the artist clinging to a series of animals. The slabs are inscribed with a variety of text slogans, Emin’s calling card. The slogans are customarily over the top, but I can feel that they are totally sincere for Emin. Emin presents an ugly sadness, one that is gratuitous and embarrassing, and we roll our eyes at it only because we have the luxury of critical distance.

It strikes me that the artist seems able to find worth and inspiration in the same emotional residue that she’s been dealing in for so much of her career. Emin has basically been on the same tip since she was in her twenties. It’s as if her perspective has not changed a bit in thirty years. Though it is satisfying to recognize parts of my own depressed attitudes in her work, Emin also terrifies me, because her sincerity reveals that it doesn’t suddenly get better when you’re middle-aged and famous.

It’s as if Emin refuses to gain any perspective on her own sadness. She can’t get over “it.” But what is “it”? There are some hints that this is a question Emin asks herself. On one bronze slab, Emin’s slumped body rides a stag above the etched, handwritten text: “I WHISPER TO MY PAST DO I HAVE ANOTHER CHOICE.” Emin’s short video, Love Never Wanted Me, features lo-fi tracing footage of a small fox on an abandoned English estate. Emin’s voice-over concludes the accompanying narrative, “I have turned myself upside down looking for love… the broken heart is a lonely world. This is the love that I know.” Emin presents us with a depiction of the heart in agonized pain without instruction for how to cope. This constant state of emotional duress is the quiet, dedicated studio practice that Emin presents for us—an everyday, inescapable sadness whose narrative never concludes.

Tracey Emin’s I Followed You To The Sun, on view through June 22 at Lehmann Maupin (both locations): 540 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001; 201 Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002.

JUERGEN TELLER. Kristen McMenamy 032c Casa Mollino No.3, Turin 2011, 2011. C-print 12 x 16 inches (image) 30.5 x 40.6 cm 13.78 x 17.72 x 1.26 inches (frame) 35 x 45 x 3.2 cm. Edition of 5. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin.

Just in time for New York Fashion Week, Juergen Teller, the German-born photographer most known for his cheeky refusal to keep his ad campaigns for designers like Helmut Lang, Yves Saint Laurent, Vivienne Westwood, and Marc Jacobs distinct from his most intimate, non-commissioned images, has an exciting new show opening at Lehmann Maupin. “I don’t really see it as commercial work when I do commercial work,” he has explained. “I see it more like… Let’s say somebody wants to do an independent film, right? They have to cast actresses and choose locations and all that. So I’m just using this stuff to create my own fantasies and dreams.”

The exhibition gives a prime sample of Teller’s no-holds-barred approach to picture-taking, which at times has lent his work an air of contention. Divided into three groups, the first series of Teller’s show features alluring portraits of Vivienne Westwood (wearing nothing but her fiery red mane) and photos of model Kristen McMenamy, which were controversial for their purportedly “pornographic” quality. The second set, Men and Women, depicts what some see as representations of the stages of masculinity — from coming-of-age to loss of virility — as contrasted with female power. The third grouping, Keys to the House, features intimate shots of friends and family as well as landscape photos taken at Teller’s home in Suffolk, UK. Click through our slideshow for a sample of photos from this bold, racy, and beautiful show.

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