An exhibition that delves into the mysteries and emotions hidden beneath the surface of photographs.
After midnight, when the streets are empty and the houses are pitch black, even the tiniest rustling sounds can become unbearably loud. That's the feeling you get from the beautiful photography exhibition on view at Luhring Augustine Gallery until June 8th. The exhibition includes works by seven artists, spanning generations, genders, and ethnicities, each in their own way silent, enigmatic, and sometimes moving. So. Unlike many shows these days, sneak through the kitchen, there is no intellectual scaffolding that requires dismantling, and the ubiquity of digital technologies is left off the table. Instead, it focuses on intimate personal revelations, but only in bits and pieces, the kind of hurtful, half-whispered words that boil with tension.
Sean Pearson, a young Brooklyn-based photographer, emerges as the star of the group. His most powerful portraits depict men comparable in age to his grandfather. The show features one of them kneeling and pointing the camera at Pearson, who lies naked on a curtained table.propped up on his right elbow, bushy eyebrows and mustache, his voice echoes. Olympia. There are several test shots lined up on the wall behind him, each pointing to a different part of his body. The work, like Manet's 1863 masterpiece, straddles the line between explicit eroticism and a kind of obscene sexlessness. Even if you're worried, the results are amazing.
Left: Sean Pearson Untitled (model), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Right: Sheyda Soleimani, regret, 2023. Courtesy of the artists Edel Assanti, London, and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Equally strange, but more kitschy, is the work of Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani. Her extensive use of toy-like scenery and props gives her tableaux a comical and expressionless drama. The extraordinary portrait depicts two elders, their faces obscured by papercuts, one playing the role of the patient and the other his doctor. Then there's a funny shot of three baby birds trampling each other for a berry given to them by a pair of tweezers, followed by a photo of a crow lying rigid on its back with a walnut in its beak. There are potential paradoxes not only about old age as a second childhood, but also about the infantilizing nature of elderly care.
Much of the work addresses photography's potential for ambiguity and obfuscation. To that end, you can't avoid mentioning Wolfgang Tillmans, Adrian Salinger, and Collier Scholl, who are major influences on the show. They popularized, if not pioneered, resistance to narrative, circumventing our attempts to make sense where there was none. Less obviously, but just as fundamentally, they rejected and subverted obvious beauty. Like most of the left-field ideas that are now part of mainstream aesthetics, to most eyes, their work becomes more beautiful over time. Their images are graphic but convey little personal and emotional content, often teetering on the verge of being released but ultimately withheld. standing on tiptoe considers a continuation of that style, but not without a lot of the specificity needed to sing such devastation.
Veteran New York City photographer Kevin Landers captures moments so seemingly mundane that most of us lose sight of them. Here you'll find untangled cobwebs, crocheted blankets hanging out to dry on clotheslines, and shopping carts full of blow-molded animals and saints. Photographs, on the other hand, are so stirred in their stillness that you never know what you're looking at. On the one hand, it feels strange, distant, and out of context. That sense of physical and psychological dislocation also informs a series of collages by Mexican artist Gonzalo Reyes Rodríguez. For this show, he cut rectangles out of the center of seemingly random snapshots of himself and filled in the gaps with photographs purchased at a bookstore in Mexico City, creating a portal into another person's world. Somewhere in between, a kind of wistful longing arises.
Left: Sophia Chai, ㅗ(0927-01), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.Right: Brittany Nelson face of mars, 2024. Courtesy of the artist, Patron of Chicago and Luhring Augustine of New York.
This exhibition will also focus on photographs with a certain degree of abstraction. Take, for example, the work of Rochester-based artist Sophia Chai. She was born in South Korea and moved to New York City at the age of 14. What appears to us as thin wobbly stripes is actually a close-up of the text. From the Korean alphabet she drew on the walls and floor of her studio. In the process, the characters lose their meaning or disappear. Some are remembered, some are forgotten, and they are beautiful.
Memories also reflect the great work of William Eric Brown, an Argentine-born New York City resident. A series of criss-crossing lines of graphite, like a babbling stream, run through photographs of collapsing icebergs and glaciers that the artist's father took in Antarctica during his 1950s stint in the U.S. Navy. Similarly, Brittany Nelson transforms found and archival images into something darker and more enigmatic. Like many of the works in her show, the appeal of her grainy black and white prints lies in their ambiguity. We see masks, dry, dusty land, and light pulsating and fluttering like the fins of a goldfish.And we listen The silence is searing, leading the refrain to a dead end.
