Images from Proximity: MFA Thesis Show

These are a few selections of work by AU's graduating MFA class. "Proximity" will be on display at the Katzen until May 18th.


Geoffrey Aldridge

(video)



(detail from drawing)



Brian Barr








Andrew S. Blair








Tim Campbell









Bradley Chriss








Lily Desaussure




(detail)





Katherine Knight











Amy Misurelli Sorensen










Max Perry




(video)




Cory Oberndorfer





(photos by Alex Ebstein)




Lauren Rice









Sharon Servilio





(image from art book)


Come check it out!

Bill Jensen at Cheim and Read

February 15 to March 24, 2007
547 West 25th, NY, NY

reviewed by Tim Campbell

Nearly two-dozen of Bill Jensen’s most recent paintings are currently on view at Cheim and Reid in Chelsea. This is Jensen’s first show at Cheim and Read, and his first show of works on canvas since leaving Mary Boone Gallery. The show reveals several years of a labor-intensive, virtuosic painting process that explores pigments, mediums, and emotions, but ultimately falls short because of Jensen’s reliance upon techniques and an inability to find new ideas in his own work.

Issues of The Brooklyn Rail were available at the gallery containing an interview with Jensen about his work and his sources for inspiration. In a particularly telling response, Jensen says that his work is very close to alchemy because of his desire to expose the energy that he finds inherent in materials; he speaks extensively on the different textures and uniqueness of pigments and the necessity to discover emotional content in these materials. In short, Jensen is addicted to paint and to painting, and this is what made the show so dazzling and so disconcerting all at once.

These new paintings are incredibly well-crafted and visually stunning; the materials are handled with great sensitivity and elegance, and the colours have a hyper-intensity that is arresting, highly emotional, and intoxicating. It is rare to find such thorough mastery of technique in art galleries. The craft and paint-handling are unapologetically the focus of these paintings, and Jensen utilizes his techniques to search for the quirky and unique compositions that result from taking chances and risks.

The paintings that stand out most are the stunning “Ape Herd VIII,” “Ashes,” “St. Sebastian,” and “Luohan #6.” The distinguishing factor that makes these paintings more successful is their ability to convey something specific, whether it is a sensation, emotion, or psychological state. “Ape Herd” and “Ashes” are two dark canvases whose faint gestural marks and deep black-violets convey somber moods and deep, empty spaces. They stand out from the other three paintings with same palette and emotional tone because the vague compositions and dark colors are more cohesive; they create gestures that border on recognizable images. This holds the viewer before the painting for a greater amount of time, which seems to be what Jensen is after. If he intends to wager everything on the materials and the process, then these works must be about looking for the viewer. Jensen is asking for patience from his audience, and for his paintings to work in this way, they must offer the viewer something to return to and dwell upon. This is slippery ground; many of the works in this show fall short because the compositions are generalized and thus inaccessible.

When it comes to content, Jensen helps some of his paintings along with a suggestive title. “St. Sebastian” and “Luohan #6” both refer to religion and religious icons (according to the press release, the Luohan were disciples of the Buddha). Jensen seems to be saying that his work has to do with a generalized sort of spirituality or religiosity; there are no specific indicators in the work besides emotion and composition, so the viewer is left on their own when it comes to connecting the works to their titles. Because of the slowness in the paintings and way that translucent colour is allowed to hover just in front of the canvas, there is a kindness, calmness, and consideration in these paintings that works well with the notion of spirituality. This sense of being content was absent in Jensen’s intense palate-knife paintings from the 80s, which explored darker parts of the psyche. It is this same consideration and contentedness that sets Jensen’s new work apart from traditional New York School abstraction.

Ultimately the hallucinatory colours that Jensen relies on in these new paintings reveal too much of the artist’s process and do not offer enough of a search. We can easily see the artist working, but we cannot see the artist making discoveries, surprising the viewer, or discovering unique paintings that remove the artist’s hand from the content. The game that Jensen plays is a familiar one; we have seen this struggle with chance and process in mid-century modernism. The great success of Jensen’s career is his ability to reinterpret this game and play it on terms that are unique to himself and his environment. The failure of this show is that Jensen relives the failures of mid-century modernism, only on his own terms and through his own interpretation. Jensen is clearly a painter of immense skill, but the viewer needs something besides virtuosity in order to find interest in the work. This show sidelined a few paintings that are absolutely wonderful, and filled the main gallery with repetitive gestures and repetitive colours. In the future, I hope Jensen will highlight his best, most unique works and sideline the repetitive ones, even if it means showing fewer paintings, because he is too good of a painter to be written off as a generic abstractionist.

A recent interview with this artist can be found at the Brooklyn Rail.

Multiple Takes on The Art of Cindy Workman

TIM CAMPBELL

Cindy Workman’s most recent prints are currently on view at Lennon Weinberg Gallery through March 3. The show delivers a series of fully-realized, single edition digital prints whose conceptual strengths work fantastically in nuanced, complex composite-images of women. The body of work addresses issues of identity, gender, sexualized imagery, and the difficulties of person-to-person interaction that go hand-in-hand with these issues.

Upon entering the gallery, several large prints are mounted to the east side behind plexiglass that is bolted to the wall. Further back in the gallery space, similar prints are displayed in plain white frames. All of the prints combine a variety of imagery from dolls, floral cloth patterns, magazine advertisements and pornography to create highly edited constructions of women. Like many other great prints and paintings, Workman shows how the best visual strategies are simple on the surface but full of intense complexity and struggle underneath.

The use of plexiglass brought to mind issues of transparency. As viewers, what are we seeing through? Are we seeing through social constructions of gender and recognizing their theatrical aspects, or are we seeing the constructions themselves and thus rendering the individuals behind them transparent? I left the gallery feeling that this question was not resolved in the work, but that it was intentionally left to the viewer to think about.

In many of the prints, such as “Woman 12,” Workman cuts and enlarges images of breasts from pornography and contrasts this enlargement with a shrunken head, whose outline is derived from either advertisement or a doll. This distortion is highly suggestive and puts the viewer in a position of discomfort because Workman is clearly referencing a predatory, sexualizing gaze directed towards women. In this piece, the head is disproportionately small, pushed back in space, and forced to confine to the outlines of an ideal shape. The mouth is blurred as though the words that issue from it are something to be skipped over, hushed. Some type of close-fitting band constricts the throat. Meanwhile, magnified breasts rendered in high grayscale relief occupy the entire lower third of the print.

The print “Large Woman 10” takes on an equally tragic tone in its discussion of childhood, growing up, and the difficulty of dealing with changing social expectations. Between the doll-like image of a young girl chasing butterflies and the soft-core porno image that dwells inside of the girl’s dress, there seems to be no chance of relief for this person in both childhood and adulthood; social constructions, expectations, and sexualization impose at every age.

The most impressive aspect of these prints is their ability to evade definition and question themselves without loosing any of their stunning visual presence. Are we looking at investigations of assigned identity, at collages of social projections of gender, or are these prints supposed to be portraits of specific individuals who must struggle with social projections, gender, and sexualization, while maintaining their own unique identity? Incredibly, the prints do all of these at once without leaving any slack behind.

What really drove these images home for me was how Workman pushed the imagery out of the realm of cold theory than can isolate viewers from highly conceptual artwork, without sacrificing any of the conceptual strength that dictated the composite arrangements. These prints are not actually collage or assemblage because they are pure-image; various images were cut and edited together on a computer and then printed digitally. None of the original material upon which the fragments were printed is included. This fuses the fragments together into a newly synthesized whole, and it lends a cohesive power to each composite image. Furthermore, Workman chose to place these images upon blank backgrounds (with the exception of an occasional butterfly). The combination of a cohesive image and a blank background pushed these prints surprisingly close to a more traditional genre: portraiture. This is what really gave the imagery a lot of power; the suggestion that the viewer might actually be looking at a portrait of an individual, a person with a specific background. The images are not just composites and clips of information; they have a strong visual and figurative presence that compels the viewer to consider each woman-image as a person here in front of them. Workman’s ability to keep the viewer guessing about where the social constructions come from, or who assigns them, only makes the work more affective and challenging. This highly successful show is certainly worth a visit as it will engage the viewer on multiple levels and its message stays with the viewer after leaving.



CORY OBERNDORFER

In a masterful play of dichotomies, Cindy Workman balances images of the innocent and the experienced, the playful and the playgirl, the naïve and the voyeuristic, and the metamorphosis between the two.

Her most recent show at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. in New York’s Chelsea District is titled “Les Demoiselles”, an obvious reference to Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (The Ladies of Avignon). Picasso’s painting depicts five prostitutes in a brothel and receives a great deal of attention due to the use of multiple styles in the same painting. For Picasso, this painting documents a transition period in his work. For Workman, it’s the ladies themselves that are caught in a transitional period.

Workman gathers her images from a number of sources. The idealized drawings of girls come from the envelopes of sewing patterns, clad in bows, ribbons, simple frocks and plain hairstyles. The soft-core nudes are obtained from photographs, publications and online sources. They offer breasts, inviting looks and the occasional accent of kink. The artist has then her sources and collaged them using computer technology and transitions in opacity and transparency. I am still unsure how these transitions should be viewed. Upon first look, it seemed that the child and adult fought for attention and dominance within the same figure. But after further viewing, the subtle transitions and overlays blend these archetypes together with an odd sense of harmony, creating a new hybrid. The hybrid idea is reflected with the occasional appearance of butterflies in her prints.

In each piece, we are witness to the physical and sexual transition. The bodies of the young girls blossom immediately into curvaceous women, fully aware of their sexuality yet sometimes still displaying shyness by covering their genitals. As viewers, we experience a metamorphosis of our own. Watching a young child at play is such an innocent activity, but seeing the adult nude in sexual poses is voyeuristic. But in actuality, the traditions of voyeurism are reversed here. The children are unaware of the viewer and are often found at play in their own world. We have stumbled across a candid moment. The adults pose full frontal or in ways that are hyper-aware of the viewer and invite the gaze. In which situation should we feel like the peeping tom?

Workman has also made a deliberate choice to cull her images from a specific time period. By using work created in or around the 1950’s, she recalls a time when gender and age roles were more strictly defined and crossing those lines was taboo. The dated material also provides color palettes for Workman to manipulate. The adult nudes are presented in black & white or muted sepia tones. The children are rendered with pastel colors found in children’s clothing or candies. The transition in palettes takes place within the figures as well as the neutral backgrounds.

While standards of propriety may have been clearly defined in the 50’s, the lines have been blurred. We now live in a time when children mature at a younger age and are inundated with images of a sexualized culture. At what point should we let go of innocence? What are the implications of the transition from virgin to whore? Can the two identities exist simultaneously? Should we enjoy the playfulness in Cindy Workman’s pieces or feel like a voyeuristic pervert? Can’t we have both?

MAXWELL O. PERRY

Cindy Workman's show was the first of a few shows that I was really impressed with on my recent trip to New York. I was not familiar with her work so that made it all the more impressive in its freshness. Her pieces are large scale ink-jet prints (most likely giclee) which appear as layered transparencies of various body parts of women, juxtaposed together to form one powerful image usually frontal with strange cropping within each layered image to accentuate the whole being the sum of the parts. The individual images come from a wide range of sources – soft core, sewing patterns, children's books, etc. Each individual image, through it's construction with the others, takes on the history of the portrayal of women in the media as well as how women portray themselves to reveal the complexity of identity.It is also significant that the women are made up of varying ages, the little girl's face in transposed with the full breasted female of a men's magazine. The act of juxtaposition references politics and time in these pieces as they seem to tell the story of themselves. They reference narrative without being narrative in nature. There are also signifiers within the images. One woman wears a bondage collar, while another holds a flower. Each one identifying and addressing stereotype and archetype while not being stereotypical in any way. The nudity in these images serves their politics as well, at once they are both exposing themselves and being revealed, but because of their construction, do not come off as pornographic but rather simply provocative. The use of the scanner and computer could be seen as a crutch, however the artist's use here separates these images from being simple pop art and transforms them, giving them an extremely modern look.It is interesting in reading the press release for the show that Workman's style developed from forms of direct collage and fully realized narrative to arrive at these striking images.

Pedagogical Vertigo: The Paintings and Drawings of Stanley Lewis

Tim Campbell

I have not yet met Stanley Lewis, but I felt compelled to write about the work in his retrospective at the Katzen Arts Center because I have recently become aware of his presence hiding behind my education as a painter. While viewing the show, I began to feel as if I had always been receiving his teachings second-hand, via professors who had worked with him or had been taught by him in the past. Mr. Lewis’s presence has been felt at the Art Institute of Chicago, Kansas City Art Institute, Yale, Boston University, the New York Studio School, and American University, among others; he has zigzagged across many of the MFA and BFA programs between Chicago and New York.

My first exposure to Lewis’s work was as an undergraduate; one of his pencil drawings was featured in a show of works on paper at my college art gallery. The same drawing that introduced me to Lewis as an undergrad is featured in his current retrospective. As I viewed and reviewed it last week, I experienced a vivid flood of memories of the exact same chunks of paper and glue, the exact same slashes into the flesh of the parchment block, the exact same cords and tendons of graphite which form such neurotic networks of branches and bramble. These drawings have a very real way of staying in your memory, because they reproduce with passionate detail the parts of landscape that art usually ignores. Lewis is incredibly capable when it comes to bringing life to his work; his edgy lines not only represent the trees he is so engaged in picturing, they become palpable, physical presences that tremble and dance before the viewer.

Much like the paintings of Pollock, this work has a physical strength to it. Physicality of material and the physical manifestation of process are clearly primary concerns for Lewis while he is painting. Unlike Pollock, however, Lewis does not erase every pictorial trace of inspiration, context, or source. He loves light-filled landscapes (there were very few cloudy, stormy or nocturnal pictures), and he is very serious about maintaining a commitment to what can be reproduced from observation. This obsession brings his work close to Giacometti’s portrait paintings. And like Giacometti, the point of these paintings seems to be for the viewer to watch Lewis trying to get it right, trying to capture what he sees in paint. It’s about the process of finding a balance between expressive mark and pictorial responsibility.

While made with incredible skill, pure craft cannot be the only goal of the work because Lewis deliberately staples fresh canvas into his paintings instead of sewing or pasting new portions, which would offer a smoother and less dramatic shift in surface. In addition, he deliberately shows the build-up of obscene amounts of paint instead of scraping the canvas down, washing it, and reworking it. The build-up of paint and the staples have another function, as well: they make the paintings more concerned with honesty than with beauty. Lewis wants to show us how he gets to a finished painting; he doesn’t want to hide his process behind a nice finish or a nice view. This honesty does not allow for a tremendous amount of variety in the paintings, but it is an honesty that I respect.

Sometimes, the paintings do not hold my interest because of the subject matter. The works show a surprising silence when it comes to commenting on the subjects they depict. The places that Lewis shows us are everyday corner stores, chain link fences, backyards and commonplace fields. They are familiar; they do not offer any surprising events buried within this familiarity, nor are they transferred into the world of metaphor or allegory. Since so much attention is spent upon the medium of paint and the process of picture-making, it is impossible to imagine these locations without the presence of Mr. Lewis. His intensity and psyche are necessary components to this work, and therefore he enters into the content.

Overall, the show displays the career of an intense artist obsessed with understanding the landscapes that he finds himself in. The paintings work best when they erupt into energetic fields of mark that compete with the spatial illusions of landscape, and the drawings come across as the stronger works because of how Lewis amazingly maps every single branch of whatever tree he is looking at. The locations found in the paintings are portrayed as they are seen by the artist; that is, as visual information for a painting. The role of these locations, or their greater importance, is left up to the viewer.

If you are interested in seeing the work of a masterful picture-maker whose main concern is the construction of paintings, then this show will be a treat for its spectacular intensity and unusual techniques. If not, then the show might prove to be uninteresting because of the commonplace qualities of Lewis’s chosen vistas. Either way, this retrospective shows the dedication and achievements of a highly unusual and unique landscape artist.

Which recently exhibited artist has been most influential on your work?
	Matthew Barney
	Jasper Johns
	Joseph Cornell
	Stanley Lewis
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting by Timothy Campbell

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

January 28 – April 29, 2007.

The work of Jasper Johns is by no means unfamiliar in today’s artworld; many major museums boast a Johns piece (or several) within their collections. His works never seem to be too far out of reach for the curious, whether you are museum-going in New York, perusing a Stockstad or Janson art-history textbook, or gallery-hopping (Johns is now in his 77th year and is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery). Indeed, Johns’ work, famous for its unique blend of seductive touch and blatant self-referentiality, is a standard tune in the contemporary art world.

For this reason, I was surprised and hopeful when the National Gallery of Art announced a show that would focus exclusively on the first decade of Johns’ work, and that would handpick a particular group of paintings from this decade. I have always found Johns’ work difficult and challenging, and I was hoping this exhibition might offer new insight into Johns as a painter. My expectations were admittedly high after the National Gallery’s last show, where curators managed to repaint the work of Constable by focusing on the differences between his large-scale romantic landscapes and his hard-won, rugged oil sketches. Could the National Gallery work the same magic, and highlight new discoveries in the work of this well-known and championed painter?

It was hard not be let down by the show immediately, before entering the galleries, because of the wall-text which announced Target as the sponsor of this exhibition. Fittingly, the first painting on view, fully visible from the hallways, was one of John’s very first Target paintings. Target is well known for its sponsorship in the arts; many of the upcoming shows scheduled at the new ICA in Boston will be sponsored by Target. However, before even entering the gallery, this seemed to be going a bit beyond typical arts sponsorship, and, sadly, I found myself wondering if Johns’ work could withstand such corporate affection and attachment.

Fortunately, the work proved the stronger and I quickly let go of my reservations. While I did not leave with any great, new insight, the show displayed all of the tricks and feats that Johns is known for with a number of his most famous canvases. In this early work, Johns looks at painting as a language and medium for expression; instead of making that medium reflective or transparent, it becomes perfectly opaque in an exploration that is by turns humorous and despairing. Johns asks himself, and the viewer, “Why say anything?” The opacity approaches a near-death for painting, a standstill that is sluggish and brooding. Painting is painting, as brushes are brushes, rulers are rulers, and “No” means “No.”

Things are simple in these paintings, but then again, they are not quite so simple. Johns is able to show us everyday objects in a perfect deadpan light that can suddenly turn on the viewer and ask them to question if they really recognize what they are seeing. This happens because of a wonderful anesthesia, surely discovered by Johns in the work of Duchamp, in which repetition and recognition show us the dark humor of representation’s shortcomings. It is amusing, even funny, when Johns shows us that a broom is a broom. However, there is also a nasty, caustic bite in this work that reminds us that language has a job, and that when that job is jettisoned, important things are left out and out of reach. The paintings, even at their most humorous, do not let go of a certain attitude of futility towards the enterprise of art-making and communication in general.

I was particularly struck by how influential Johns’ work is to the contemporary art world. The long list of influences in Johns’ work and the precedent that he set for countless artists makes him a veritable art-prophet for the latter twentieth century. Johns’ relationship to earlier modernism is not hard to find; the brushstrokes and the literal qualities of his mark are an instant reminder of Cezanne, whom Johns has cited as a major influence. A “Do-It-Yourself Target” painting shows Johns’ affection for Duchamp. In “Device Circle,” Johns hijacks a de Kooning painting and reemploys the primary-color palate and the slashing brushstroke with a vigor that laughs in the face of the New York School and discards their existential jabbering as nothing more than painterly device and noisy bravado.

Then come the predictions of artists-to-come: “Diver, 1962,” prefigures the pop of Rosenquist (think of the large-scale F-111) while the preparatory drawing for that piece, “Diver, 1962-1963” gives a glimpse into the austere world of minimalism. The drawings speak of work yet-to-be-made by Jim Dine, while Johns’ ridiculous practice of naming the object that is painted suggests some of the bizarre video-work by Bruce Nauman in which Nauman repeats words in an endless loop while gazing at the camera. “Voice,” another shockingly austere piece, predicts the assemblage and painterly textures of Keifer. I even found myself thinking of the retrograde romanticism of Jake Berthot’s work from the ‘80s and early ‘90s while looking at Johns’ grayscale paintings of stacked squares. There is a small bit of the romantic, barely detectable, in some of Johns’ work, where the painterly touch offers a minute dose of human forgiveness in the face of dark humor.

One recommendation I have for viewers is that they follow the Johns exhibition with a brief viewing of the painting “Perilous Night” on the bottom floor of the East Building. Johns made this painting in 1982, and the subtlety and honesty in that particular piece is difficult to find anywhere else in the East wing.

While the blatant sponsorship by Target is bothersome, the Jasper Johns show proves that strong work can stand up to the cutthroat business that is at the heart of commercial galleries and our museums. The show offers a great opportunity to see the work of a highly influential artist who knows how to think and paint, and unfortunately, it reminds us that the dollar-value of artwork never goes unnoticed by the art institution and that corporate advertising can bring the kiss of kitsch to anything, including a Johns Target. As long as admission remains free at the National Gallery, they can go ahead and share a slogan with the Target corporation: “Expect More, Pay Less.”

Photography/Civilian G Fine Art by Timothy Campbell

Allusions to painting abound in G’s current show of contemporary photography. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer encounters a handsome C-print by Tim Hyde entitled “Los Angeles.” A steady lens captures an abandoned highway ramp in LA that is described in dusty, dry atmosphere. The mechanical curves and ellipses of heavy concrete are set in opposition to two vertical concrete supports, which lend an elastic energy to the normally bulky and imposing ramps. This linear and gestural energy is underscored by the strange absence of cars; instead of supporting the path of automobiles speeding through the metropolis, this highway claims the negative space of the photograph as its own and navigates it with stunning confidence and control. In the lower corner, the viewer must be sure not to miss a tiny stop sign touched by graffiti, which offers us a hint of human presence struggling with the highway, and a pun on the term “signage.”

The tensions and contradictions in this piece establish a context for the rest of the show, which seems to explore a meeting-point between extreme light effects and the banal world of everyday events. It also gives us a reference to modern monumentality, and in the larger-than-life geometry of the highway ramp, calls out a suggestion of high minimalism and minimalist painting.

Hyde’s next two photographs are less interesting; both offer distant nighttime views of large buildings and surrounding trees under intense spotlights. These photos are a sort of reverse Turner; instead of distant romantic cities that appear as mirage in a light-soaked seascape, we find the imposing presence of contemporary American architecture and its electric lights that seep out menacing into the quiet night.

Turner occurred to me over and over again while viewing this show. This is because of certain pictorial ingredients that these photographers share with Turner. First, most of these photographers use light as a developing medium, in which an image emerges through subtle gradation to a state of visual clarity. Turner, much like a photographer, used light to develop the atmosphere in his paintings, instead of building the space with flat planes and draftsmanship. In addition, many of the featured photographs throw extreme qualities of light upon basic scenes of human existence, just as Turner would throw the elements of light and water upon his ships at sea and his European sea-cities. The main difference is in the type of life depicted: Turner was concerned with notions of the romantic, the national, the absolute and the sublime, while the photographers sharing wall space at G are far more interested in the smaller details of contemporary life. To their credit, the contradictions and light-filled moments in these photos offer a very interesting show that finds its own parodies of sublimity, and even a few instances of a cool-headed contemporary sublime.

Luisa Lambri’s laserchrome print, entitled “Untitled (Strathmore 11),” shows a collision of photography with the quiet discipline of Anges Martin. The photo is of a venetian blind with afternoon light- nothing more, nothing less. The slight and thin lines that describe the blinds and the subtle gradations of just a bit of sunlight bring Martin’s logic and intellectual sublime in contact with one of the most banal of all objects. The photo pokes fun at Martin’s metaphysical endeavors, showing an instance of perfect geometry and measurement meeting a perfectly commonplace moment. The subtleties of this piece also called to mind the quiet light and ruled lines of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series.

Next to this piece is Hannah Starkey’s “May 2003.” This photograph would have been the highlight of the show had it not been for some grainy and dull moments. A woman smoking a cigarette gazes out at the viewer while sitting in a laundry room. Strangely, light entering the room from an unseen window highlights a floatation device hanging from the ceiling. The life-preserver brought themes of water, and thus Turner, back to my mind, and its bizarre contrast to a woman smoking a cigarette brought notions of expiration and illness to my mind. In this photo, the dangerous qualities of light came to the forefront. Like the cigarette, it can burn, it can cause decomposition, it can make a new thing old, and it can bleach clothing. Light’s more subtle dangers are aligned with the extreme violence of Turner’s rain, light, and sea storms.

Miguel Angle Rios’ series of untitled prints held pride of place at G, occupying the middle wall of the gallery. The basic blacks and whites of these photos show us a series of cables tied to knobs of some sort. The image, again like Turner, borders on abstraction, but hints at the ropes and knots one might find on a sailboat. The series shows the ropes slowly becoming detached from the undefined knobs and snapping back in space, revealing the hidden tension in such banal situations.

Of all the photographs, the most disappointing were Paul Vinet’s “People” images. These two photographs show distant images of tourists and city-goers dispersing through a white sea of acrylic paint. The images held an undeniable similarity to Turner simply because the viewer finds images of humanity in a distant and expansive sublime light. However, the sublime light is acrylic paint, slathered upon the photo in thick globs that mock the gestural violence of Jackson Pollock. These works are an ill-conceived, cliché, and downright academic critique of modernism that has been played over and over again. If viewers are interested in a critique of modern painting, I suggest the Johns show at the National Gallery as an alternative, where one finds parody handled with subtlety, tact, and understanding. These two works appeared whiny and formulaic in comparison to the other photos and the Johnsian critique of the modern gesture.

G Fine Art meant for this show of photography to be an accompaniment to its supposed main attraction, which is a collection of several works by local DC area artists. It seemed strange to me that the photos held so much space in the main gallery when the local work held the main title for the show (“Civilian at G”). These local works struck me as weak and unrelated, and it was difficult to give them time and attention when shown next to the photographs adjacent.

Overall, I was surprised by the photography at G; photography is rumored to have been one of the deathblows to painting, along with film and television. This show displayed strong photographs which, instead of stealing from painting or riding its coattails, suggest a relationship that might not be so negative and harmful to explore.