Carla Jay Harris. Teresa Cooper 1947, 2012; archival pigment print; 20 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Carolyn (2012) is part of the Dirt, Dust, Sand, Concrete series that creates a photographic essay of Smithfield, Virginia, and its residents. (The artist was born and raised in Smithfield, and much of her family still lives there.) The town’s only industrial engine, Smithfield Foods, was bought out by a Chinese conglomerate. The subject of Carolyn, a woman well into the later stages of her middle age, presumably named Carolyn, glances sidelong, not into but at the camera, from a slightly elevated position while sitting on her elegant wood-framed and needlework patterned couch. With the smallest hint of a knowing smile, mixed with the benevolent skepticism of an old friend or family member, she rests with neatly cut and straightened hair and her sturdy arms folded.

Carla Jay Harris. Carolyn, 2012; archival pigment print; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Harris’ composition is neither hopeful nor pessimistic, as her central figure projects an aura of knowing calm and near indifference in a potentially difficult moment; Carolyn is merely just part of the photograph, neither the focal point nor the background. The triangularly formed self-aware quartet of deep, near-red pink fabrics drives the eye around the image away from the figure—from curtain, to Carolyn’s shirt, back up to the reflection of the curtain in an ornate gold mirror and onto a matching gold wall ornament of metal flowers—into what seems an endless series of reflections, refractions that become slightly pink shadows.

Carla Jay Harris. Momento, 2012; archival pigment print; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Another work in the same series, Momento (2012), treats its subject matter with the same kind of respect and even-handedness that the artist uses to compose the elements in Carolyn. In Momento, though, there is no figure to ground the objects and their context with a personal story. The scene has a depth of character that is conveyed by the way the objects are depicted; it’s a moody close-up of the top third of a television, with two oil-burning lamps flanking a decorative ceramic buck, set against a backdrop of half-closed window blinds and lacy white curtains. Harris extends the frame by cropping the image like a film still, with a continuing narrative just outside the scene that opens a larger idea of space and time. Are these objects from a home or an office? Are the settings and figures in turmoil or just continuing on with life as usual, as part of the contemporary American South, where the past and present seem to mix interchangeably?

Carla Jay Harris. Adam Cooper 1796, 2012; archival pigment print; 20 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

In the Culture of Desperation series, Harris depicts with an intimate yet distanced lens a record company (where she used to work) during a confounding cycle of ups and downs. The artist notes: “I was repeatedly struck by how product, promoter, and creator were uniquely intertwined—as were their fates. In order to support the ever-increasing demands of an ever-changing market, artists were pushed, overextended, burned out, turned down, and quickly replaced. Similarly, behind the scenes, full corporate commitment was mandated, layoffs were frequent, and the older and more experienced waited with trepidation to be replaced…” Harris’ words capture the tensions that are often hidden in many of her works. There is always a story behind the objects and figures in her compositions, but Harris has a unique ability to communicate situations while avoiding fetishizing her subjects and their settings—one doesn’t need to know the story, just that there is one. The office space in Adam Cooper 1796 (2012), or what is left of it—a tangle of chords, discarded CDs, and a bare window—could be the beginning or the end of a chapter at an office, a chapter that holds both hope and despair.

Carla Jay Harris. Samantha Gable 0715, 2012; archival pigment print; 20 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

By naming each work in this series after a person, Harris grounds each in an enigmatic aura. What can we glean about the people represented by Samantha Gable 0715 (2012) and Adam Cooper 1796? Who were they, and does it matter? What was and is this office that shows the remnants of a corporate culture amid a constant cycle of hirings and firings? What are the myriad stories of each corporate office cubicle, filing room, and workspace—what dreams, aspirations, goals, and ideas were imagined, realized, and left unfulfilled in each, and where do they echo now?

Carla Jay Harris. Kristen Song 1212, 2012; archival pigment print; 20 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Where Adam Cooper 1796 conveys an abandoned space, Samantha Gable 0715 depicts a fully used office, a warm, insulated atmosphere punctuated by a hopeful sliver of light. This variability and balance between hopefulness and emptiness is where Harris’ work is strongest. By treating people, settings, and objects as equally important, through a deft handling of the interplay of light, color, shape, and space, Harris sidesteps a specific portrayal. Instead of directing meaning, the artist drops hints and poses questions as she looks to the larger complexities in the composition of a situation, a person, an industry, an object, or a city.

Carla Jay Harris is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. She earned her MFA in Fine Art from UCLA and her BS in Media Studies from the University of Virginia. She has studied at the Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Long Beach, Washington, DC; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Newark, New Jersey. Her work has been collected by the Johns Hopkins University, the Avon Foundation, and the Embassy of Trinidad and Tobago in Washington, DC.

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Mark Steinmetz. Off I-40, Knoxville, TN, 1993; silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans.

Steinmetz is a lover of tradition and the interconnected stylistic lineages that make up the 150-year history of photography. His use of black-and-white photography makes visible his investment in the early history of the medium, as does his masterful execution of the silver gelatin process, which, unlike digital color printing, opens the surface of the picture to flaws, textures, aberrations, and the artist’s hand. Emphasis on the purity of details and rich contrasts of lights and darks continues the aesthetic of early 20th-century East Coast Pictorialism, while his penchant for the neglected margins of cities and their inhabitants resonates with the countercultural aesthetic and ethics of the West Coast Photographic Movement of the 1930s. Oscillating between portraits and landscapes, the selection of photographs at the Ogden establishes a rhythm where face and landscape correspond and converse with one another, asking the viewer to notice formal and emotional similarities between nature and man—a curatorial decision that begs association with the aesthetic and intellectual practices of modernist master Alfred Stieglitz. Throughout the galleries, Stieglitz’s emphasis on the interiority of his subjects resonate in Steinmetz’s photographs, as does Stieglitz’s transcendental aesthetic philosophy of “embodied formalism,” where aesthetic harmony depends on the corporeal synchronization between the artist, subject, and nature.[2]

Mark Steinmetz. Barrow County, GA, 1992; silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Film also figures in his practice. Steinmetz is a voracious lover of film noir and the work of Italian directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, and his photographs function at times like film stills. One finds oneself eager—almost desperate—to enter into and therefore complete the story Steinmetz so seductively withholds from the viewer.[3] While exaggerated staging and artifice do not interfere with the photograph like they do in the work of Cindy Sherman, a quality of cinema is nevertheless present. However, it is Steinmetz’s place within the loose constellation of “straight photography” of the 1960s and ’70s that most strongly informs his style and photographic ethics. Garry Winogrand’s documentary impulse, commitment to transparency, and “antipathy to the ‘arty’” can be felt in the quietness of each encounter. (Steinmetz met and photographed with Winogrand in Los Angeles during the last year of his life, and consistently mentions him as an important figure within his own artistic development.) The artist’s inexhaustible curiosity reminds one of William Eggelston and Robert Adams’ commitment to the long-term project, and yet Steinmetz does not shirk away from humor or trickery, offering the viewer a virtuosic surprise or unexpected spontaneity that reveal an indebtedness to the work of Lee Friedlander.[4]

Despite the work’s visual allure, technical rigor, and art-historical awareness, it is not without problems. In Steinmetz’s account of “The South,” the violence, alienation, racism, and poverty that underpin these photographic worlds are never given their full weight—the fragmented fiction gives us only part of the story—and the viewer is left merely with a beautiful encounter where subject and site are represented in perfect unison, manipulated into an exaggerated order where the artist’s individual vision is privileged over an investigation of the societal problems that placed these figures within these landscapes in the first place. Made as if by an itinerant traveler who is detached from his subjects yet committed to a particularly cinematic emotional pitch, Steinmetz’s portraits level the differences among individuals—as if each of these subjects were part of the same story, neutralized by their struggles and anesthetized by their shared geography.

Mark Steinmetz. Knoxville, TN, 1992; silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

The critical efficacy and political potential of photography is not a new debate (see Susan Sontag and Martha Rosler), and Steinmetz is not the only photographer to be accused of sidestepping these issues—every photographer from Paul Strand to Walker Evans to Jeff Wall has been accused of the aestheticization of their dispossessed subjects to the point of banality.[5] The democratic potential of photography and its role as a social document committed to uncovering the great ailments of modern life has been the great contestation of the medium, and Steinmetz’s photographs enter into this discussion by giving us ambiguous answers. Despite the great beauty of Steinmetz’s images, it is difficult to turn away from the conditions of working-class life presented in this series, the slowness of working-poor politicization and organization, and the impoverishment of communities in this part of the United States. The question being, do these images ratify or denounce a painful identity of life in the South? Do the photographs reconstruct an aesthetic consciousness based on nostalgia, or open the viewer’s eyes to the historical conditions of lives lived, thereby contaminating the purity and autonomy of modernism and its traditions? Are we looking to contemplate, or looking to act? If anything, Steimetz’s collection of images reinvigorates the ambiguous and contradictory core of photography—that repressive and progressive readings of, and responses to, any given image are always possible.

Mark Steinmetz: South is on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art through May 10, 2015.

[1] Garry Badger, “Lee Friedlander,” The British Journal of Photography (March 6, 1976): 200.

[2] For more on Stieglitz’s “embodied formalism,” see Marcia Brennan’s tremendous book, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

[3] Special thanks must go to Richard McCabe, the Ogden Museum’s Curator of Photography, for speaking with me about his curatorial process and his perspective on Steinmetz’s work.

[4] Jonathan Green, American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present (New York: Abrams Press, 1983), 105-113.

[5] For recent academic work on these issues, see: Olivier Debroise, Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001; Frank Moller, Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; and Patrick Greaney, Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin, Ann Arbor: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Oscar Muñoz. Sedimentaciones, 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist, the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, and the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami.

The gallery is dark save for the surface of three tables illuminated by projectors from above and faint rays of light let in from the nearby lobby. Slips of neatly arranged photographic paper flanked by two sinks are projected onto each table. Some of the papers bear portraits printed with what appears to be charcoal, while others are blank. The artist’s hand enters the projection’s frame, selects a portrait, and dips it in water. The portrait “slips” off the paper and into the sink. The residue of the portrait circles around the drain and finally the face disappears. Soon the process is reversed in the opposite sink as it fills with water and the dark residue of an image. The same hand dips a blank leaf of paper into the water to catch a portrait and returns the new image to the table. The endless gurgles from the six sinks filling and draining murmur throughout the museum. The process resembles table magic. While it is unclear what is happening and how, one thing is for certain: this is an enigmatic alchemical photographic process.

Oscar Muñoz: Sedimentaciones, an exhibition featuring an installation of the same name currently on view at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, immediately recalls the violence of Colombia, where Muñoz was born and still lives. The current conflict in Colombia is an ongoing civil war that stretches for more than half a century into the past. Though the installation speaks well to more universal feelings of death and memory, it seems to convey a piece of the Colombian conflict with special poignancy.

The cycle in Sedimentaciones is incessant and weighs heavy. The erased portraits are perpetually replaced with new ones, underscoring a nagging fear that the conflict may never actually come to an end. Further, the certainty that all the photographs will eventually be effaced set against the uncertainty of which one is next undoubtedly carries a terrible familiarity for communities set within such conflicts. It’s difficult to overlook the similarity between the activity in Sedimentaciones and the process of developing photographs; the gallery is like a busy darkroom. However, the distinction is critical: these aren’t bodies but decidedly photographs. Sedimentaciones is the documentation of people coming into and out of existence. There is a different sort of death here. It is the remembrance of people slipping in and away under the activity of a larger hand that hardly seems to notice them.

Oscar Muñoz: Sedimentaciones is on view at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum through March 7, 2015.

Danny Olda is a writer and editor based in Florida.

Matt Sheridan Smith. Widow – Fig. 3 Ep. 1; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.

And what a subject he has chosen. The title of the exhibition, Widow Fig. 1 Ep. 3, refers to the widow Clicquot, who is perhaps better know by her French name: Veuve Clicquot. Born into a wealthy family in 1777, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin was only 27 when she inherited her husband’s wine business upon his death (either from typhoid or suicide, depending on who you ask). At the time, the British had developed a style of champagne that was cloudy with yeast residue and large, inelegant bubbles. The widow perfected a process of drawing out the sediment into the neck of the bottle so it could be removed, giving us the clear, sparkling, fine-bubbled beverage we celebrate with today. Clicquot died at the age of 88, her legacy established as “a woman who was a smashing success long before anyone conceptualized the glass ceiling.”[2]

Matt Sheridan Smith. Scratch (Untitled), 2014; paper mounted to aluminum; 50 ¾ x 35 ¾ X 1 ½ in. Courtesy of the Artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.

Sheridan Smith doesn’t focus much on the biographical specifics of her life, choosing instead to represent her through opaque symbolism. As portraiture, this yields mixed results, but he has created some individual works that are truly compelling. A number of pieces on linen, each titled Pattern Portrait (Widow) (2014) feature gold bubble patterns on faint white grids. The bubbles range in size—on some canvases they are large and clunky, and on others they are delicate and dense like those in champagne. The artist created these works by placing a Xerox coated in acrylic gel medium on the linen and then rubbing most of the paper away, until only the image and bits of paper (the faint white grid) are left. The resulting ghostly image is the product of erasure instead of accretion. The artist’s hand is absent, but the work bears the trace of his physical interaction. The results are hypnotic and haunting.

Matt Sheridan Smith. Pattern Portrait (Widow), 2014; acrylic gel medium transfer, paper, linen; 56 x 80 X 1 ½ in. Courtesy of the Artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.

Image creation by obliteration is also at play in a series of Scratch works. Here, Sheridan Smith begins with a tight bubble pattern, which he has covered in scratch-off ink (think lottery scratch-off tickets). On some, the ink is the signature Clicquot yellow-orange, on others gold or black. Two are left untouched, the pattern barely visible beneath sublime, glowing monochromes. On the rest, he has used his hand or a knife to scratch off areas of the ink, revealing bits of the pattern beneath. To reveal the entire pattern—thus achieving revelation—would require destruction of the work. Sheridan Smith has provocatively begun this process, challenging us to follow him, if not with our hands, then with our eyes—to attempt to see beyond the surface.

Other attempts at portraiture are similarly obscured but less satisfying. On top of a digitally printed portrait of the widow herself (from an 1861 painting by Léon Cogniet), Sheridan Smith has placed a grid of polished aluminum. When we try to visually piece together the entire image, we see slices of ourselves staring back. It is an interesting optical trick, but it falls flat next to the nuanced and subtle pattern works.

A large installation, Untitled (Skin Contact) (2014), includes a pile of dirt, deadly nightshade plants, and champagne glasses perched on two yellow-orange Formica pedestals. Two of the glasses are filled with champagne (replenished periodically by gallery staff), two others with the residue of lees, the yeast used in champagne production. The dirt could be seen as an allusion to the terroir so important to wine production, while the champagne glasses might serve as a kind of obtuse vanitas image. The poisonous plant comes off as a failed attempt at edginess. Although intriguing, the piece feels on the whole unconvincing, pointing in different directions without following through.

In building a portrait of the widow Clicquot, Sheridan Smith problematizes a facile definition of identity. His work makes the case that representational images hold no more claim to biography than colors or patterns. Not all of his works hit the mark, but the ones that do are well worth the visit.

Matt Sheridan Smith: Widow – Fig. 3 Ep. 1 is on view at Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles through August 23, 2014.

[1] Exhibition press release

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/books/review/Stern-t.html

The Laws Of Order, 2012, acrylic, collage, colored pencil on paper mounted to canvas, 5'x6'

In our predominantly consumerist society, it is increasingly difficult to disconnect ourselves from our belongings. Barbara Kruger summarized the contemporary Cartesian dualism when she created her 1987 piece, “I Shop Therefore I am.” The more we define ourselves through our endlessly multiplying clutter, the harder it is to relate to others who don’t share our specific collection of objects onto which we project meaning and the illusion of importance. To create the works in his current exhibition, The Collected, at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco, Amir H. Fallah hijacked individuals’ possessions to create narrative portraits through their stuff.

The Earth Is But One Country (Eastern Bred, Southern Fed), 2013, acrylic, ink, collage, oil on paper mounted to canvas, 48 x 72 in

Immediately Fallah subverts the quality of a traditionally “good” portrait; in each painting the figure is almost entirely obscured by textiles that slip back and forth between the perception of depth and two-dimensionality. He denies the viewer what would be, for many portraits, the pivotal opportunity to render a likeness. Instead, Fallah concentrates on their favorite items as well as whatever bits of personal detritus he finds compelling. So while the portrait is created through objects, they may not be the objects that the subjects would have chosen to define themselves. Impressing his subjective interpretation of the sitter, Fallah reclaims his artistic liberty and separates himself from the likes of a hired caricaturist merely creating something to please the client but not necessarily depicting anything insightful or illuminating. Demanding even more freedom from such a role, when the portraits are commissions, the clients are not allowed to see the paintings until they are completely finished.

Lost in a Field, 2012, acrylic, collage, colored pencil on paper mounted to canvas, 48 x 36 in

The resulting works are a celebration of form, texture, line, and color but most importantly risk and failures. Fallah utilizes a multimedia and layered technique, combining collage, printing and painting, building each work in sections. The material aspects are always rendered first, using water-based media. Once that aspect is complete, Fallah completes the organic elements in oil paint which he feels better captures the luminosity of living things. Rupturing depth and perspective, the graphic borders of each painting break away from the edges of the canvas, weaving in and out of textiles, body parts and objects as a sort of road map through the painting. The compositions are both fluid and fragmented, embracing the moments when things don’t quite align, giving the works a sense of honesty.

Installation, Gallery Wendi Norris, 2013

In an attempt to walk the line between seductive and tacky, Fallah hand painted a floral motif on the gallery walls with references to overly romanticized wallpaper of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The reductive nod to the Baroque interior decorating technique creates a balance of whimsy in contrast to the narrative-saturated paintings. The entire collection of works is a pendulous examination of high and low art, and how an individual can be represented. Fallah achieves equilibrium through his openness to experiment with radically different methods, whether they are traditionally acceptable or not. Ultimately, and perhaps most interestingly, though the subject matter is a specific individual surrounded by their specific things, through his choices Fallah reveals more about himself than anything else.

Installation, Gallery Wendi Norris, 2013

The Collected is on view at Gallery Wendy Norris March 14–April 27.

Image from Street Level Photoworks

A solo exhibition of Victor Albrow’s photography is currently on view at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow. On entering the exhibition space, one is immediately drawn to the almost life-size portraits through the odd contrast of figures in a contemporary setting staged so to be reminiscent of Renaissance portrait paintings. While Albrow did not intentionally create parallels with Renaissance portraiture, the similarities and contexts are palpable. Two distinctive qualities of Renaissance portrait paintings were technical innovation that allowed for much greater detail in rendering, and a democratization in choice of subjects, where people from different social classes, not just the privileged, were depicted. These two aspects of introducing new techniques and social demographics mark issues in contemporary art which emanate from Albrow’s works.

Image from Street Level Photoworks and copyright of Victor Albrow

Albrow’s photographic portraits exude an unmistakable sheen of digital production. While the camera was initially used as a window into social life through documentation, the ubiquity of digital technology has moved us along a trajectory where the motif of fact versus fiction is now deeply embedded in photography and art production of various media. Within this context, a viewer recognizes each of the photographs as a tableau, constructed and choreographed.

Image from Street Level Photoworks and copyright of Victor Albrow

Albrow selects each of his subjects, some purposefully, but most by serendipity, and has each carefully and precisely transformed in the studio. Each subject appears styled based on physical and social codes. For instance, the associations of the color white, pickles with pregnancy, the embossed eagle insignias, a plate of chips, gravy and pie, all have evolved to become signifiers of culture and class. The acknowledgment of the construction of the scene makes explicit a provocation to question if these codes are demonstrative of the person “behind” the image and the validity of appearances and images in relation to our lived experiences. Regardless of the staging, a sense of despondency from the bare and vacant expressions which contributes to a pervasive human quality is felt, and further wrestles uncomfortable with the air of artifice within each work.

Albrow (b. 1952) was placed second in the Schweppes Portrait Prize 2003 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and participated in Future Face an international touring exhibition which was presented at the Science Museum, London. His work is in various private collections and the permanent collection of the Ivory Press Gallery, Madrid.

Rachel Zoe, 32" x 24" , oil on linen. Courtesy Kimberly Brooks and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The art world. It’s way more serious and important than every other industry! This thinking at least seems to persist even though the field of contemporary art has maintained an open flirtation with its sassy sister, the fashion industry, since long before even Andy Warhol trotted his wacky wigs around Studio 54 with the likes of Diane von Fürstenberg. There is a mutual fascination between the two fields, and yet it seems that the art world would prefer to keep its consorting with the fashion industry confined strictly to social events, rather than consider fashion (so low-brow!) as a worthy subject matter for actual works of art.

Los Angeles-based artist, Kimberly Brooks‘, current solo show at Taylor De Cordoba gallery in Culver City breaks with this norm to explore the intrigue of the fashion industry’s most iconic stylemakers—without the precept of farce or condemnation. The Stylist Project (on view through April 3rd) presents Brooks’ latest body of work—a series of oil painted portraits of fashion industry insiders, including stylist to the starts and Bravo TV fixture, Rachel Zoe, and award winning costume designer and Madonnaʼs personal stylist Arianne Phillips, among others.

The work on view blends the fields of art and fashion astutely, presenting the fashionable set as they have styled themselves, while at the same time drawing upon the ages-old artistic tradition of portraiture. The regal positions of some of the sitters recall Renaissance royals, and the sprawled poses of others touch on the early Modern depiction of courtesans, such as Edouard Manet’s Olympia.

Arianne Phillips, 30" x 24", oil on linen. Courtesy Kimberly Brooks and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The Stylist Project is the third solo show for Brooks at Taylor De Cordoba. The first two, Mom’s Friends (2007) and Technicolor Summer (2008), explored much more personal subject matter than the present show. Brooks’ outward shift to now document the fashion industry with this latest series has garnered a lot of attention from media and publications that wouldn’t normally publish gushing articles about fine artists. At the Taylor De Cordoba gallery, they’ve laid out a stack of glossies with Brooks’ name inked onto them. When I asked Heather Taylor, Director of Taylor De Cordoba, to discuss the widespread reception that this exhibition has received, she told me, “The bottom line is that people are hungry for this dialogue and Kimberly is pulling the curtain back on the fashion world, which up until the past year—with the popularity of [the film] ‘The September Issue’ and [the TV show] ‘The Rachel Zoe Project’—had been fairly mysterious.”

New York born, Los Angeles based, Kimberly Brooks maintains her studio in Venice, CA. She earned her BA from UC Berkeley and trained in fine arts at Otis College of Art and Design and UCLA. Her work has been included in numerous juried exhibitions, including at Pleiades Gallery of Contemporary Art, New York; Risk Press Gallery, Los Angeles; and Phillips de Pury Auction House, Los Angeles.