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I was at the opening for Christopher Daniels’ first solo exhibit at Number 35 Gallery last week. His two canvas drawings on display were enough to fill the small room, because the canvases were so large that they each consumed a whole wall, and, in fact, had to be stretched inside that very room because there was no other way for them to be brought inside. I know that Christopher had been working meticulously on these two drawings for months and months and they deserved their own show. In contrast to recent shows here in New York, like Marcel Dzama and the Henry Darger-ism show at the American Folk Art Museum, Christopher’s drawing installation is very painterly despite the mannered technique of his little hand drawn characters. I’d say the fun and coloring was more akin to the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum.

Number 35 Gallery, April 19th, 2008.

What the gallery says about Christopher’s work is that the drawings are made up of thousands of tiny characters in a map-like world of “impossible landscapes.” And this is what a lot of people paid attention to when they looked over the drawings. They would point at little characters or little icons or symbols, each drawn tiny like impulsive drawings in the margins of a school text, hidden in dense patterns of yet more characters. But the most interesting facet of his work, to me, was that the drawings performed well because of the coloring. Christopher is a talented colorist.

Drawing by Christopher Daniels.

The majority of the abstract color work in his pieces, the color field choices, and the push and pull of the larger areas of color and contrasts made the tiny figures almost inconsequential as to what they signified - until you get close enough. Which is why the scale really matters. The shapes and balances were very lovely and enveloping if you stepped back enough (not that you really could, though, since the gallery is quite narrow). You get a sense of what you might experience from afar when you see the above photo of the drawing. It reminds me of Clyfford Still in a strange way. There’s a sort of raggedness. However, the use of squares of color in small portions undermine that and he’s better off in the areas of the canvas that avoid them. Also, the few areas that were worked over with white paint did feel heavier than the bare canvas, so I wish he had restricted himself in some places, but there was never enough paint for these to qualify as paintings.

These drawings take Christopher so long, I can hardly wait to see others with different palettes as he grows, especially something with a richer tonal variety (not just limited to Crayola and Prismacolor pencils and crayons). Hopefully it won’t be another year between drawings!

Keegan from Lise Sarfati’s recent work in NY Magazine’s article “The Waiting Room.”

I was in a waiting room a few weeks ago, leafing through the magazines, when I saw Magnum photographer Lise Sarfati’s name printed at the bottom of some really good editorial work. It also made me stop to read the article. Lise’s sensibilities have made her one of the people I most admire in photography today, ever since I first looked at her book The New Life and read about her process in Aperture. And whether it’s Alec Soth in W, Katy Grannan in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, or Lise Sarfati here, I like seeing my favorite art photographers lend their voice to writers or new subjects in magazines for a wider audience. I assume it’s more open now than ever before. In the heyday of print, there certainly were big names who worked both sides of commerce and art (Arbus, Penn, etc.), not to mention the more famous documentarians and editorialists who blurred the lines over and over (Frank, etc), but lesser known artists have traditionally had less access to mainstream media before the digital era.

Which is why, even though she’s a member of Magnum, Lise is one of my favorite hybrid outsider/insiders. Her editorial photos are first-rate and almost traditional; more than illustration, they are meant to be a counterpoint or an illucidation for the text, like with “The Waiting Room” and Lise’s pictures of claustrophobic sensuality and forced emotional stasis. However, they also glow from her unique personal attention to the individual subjects and their soft-shells of purposeful inhibition, but with nothing too saccharine or, contrarily, indemnifying. Like Hellen van Meene, she has an outsider’s eye for the spirit that lurks within a timid or awkward subject and an excellent sense for complimentary ambient lighting. That’s rare. Typically, small story editorial photography in magazines demands an off-putting and blunt manner (I think of the endless redundant Esquire from the 60’s imitations), so the temptation is to just add to the glut of similar iconography that’s already out there or cop out with a forcefully mannered concept piece. Lise jumps off the page in contrast-for now. I think New York Magazine is very aware that they need to co-opt outsiders. As marketing goes, the best pandering is to appear as if you aren’t pandering, knowing that we all tend to react better to subtle underdogs with a comercial outsider’s perspective. The marketers can keep this up as long as there are outsiders that are inclined to survive the hybridization process. That’s the process where commercial clamdiggers look into the tidal zone (between too-outsider and the accessible fringe) and they carry back their findings to sell us for the supper table.

And yes, the title of the article was also a bit funny to me because I was sitting in a little room being force fed a diet of new age music.

Down in the food court, you can get your fill of pizza, Indian take-out, cheesecakes, and backlit photos.

Ever since I saw the Snow Globe series by Martin and Munoz, which was exciting for me whenever I was eating lunch at Grand Central (for the whole time it was there - well over a year), I get anxious to see what new installations get put up in the underground cafeteria’s Lightbox Project. The latest is a bit meta… “Meet Me At Grand Central.” A group of photos by Boris Klapwald that were taken in the early 1950’s. They’re all hyper-American, black and white, often with cinematic lighting, and for quick snapshots they look great as large scale transparencies. The 40” x 30” aluminum lightbox frames that look like Parisian steampunk windows are always fun to see, too, just for themselves. I often wonder if that’s half the appeal.

Photo of the accompanying video on display at the museum.

After reading about them some time ago, I was completely unprepared for the 30 or so large prints by photographer Robert Creamer when I stumbled onto them last weekend. That is to say, I didn’t know they were on display at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in D.C. when I went there, but I’m glad I found them. They had my jaw on the floor.

For his subjects, he uses plants, flowers, and all sorts of natural specimens, some even from famous collections, but his arrangements are intuitively sculpted. As you can see (above), he uses his scanner as canvas and places objects onto the glass plane, or carefully dangles them above it with string, so that the scanner’s light will be the main source of illumination and everything else will fall to black out of its very short reach. The scanner, of course, is like a horizontal view camera capable of incredible detail. He says himself that he opens the files in Photoshop afterwards as routine, but they don’t need any retouching. The resulting prints are engaging in a way you can’t expect seeing thumbnails on a page. Creamer brings great talent to this process.

Another still from the museum’s video.

It’s precisely the sort of thing that a natural history museum’s audience would appreciate as illustration for a display, but Creamer’s mis-en-scene is more attuned to the abstract expressionism he sees reflected in the colors and textures. That’s why he’s got his own undiluted gallery space in the museum. His large prints are very satisfying, not only because they’re unabashed about the level of detail they preserve, but because they are so well controlled and obviously improvised with a painter’s eye at the same time.

Clockwise, starting top-left: Hellen van Meene at Yancey Richardson Gallery, Sarah Anne Johnson at Julie Saul Gallery, Mitch Epstein at Sikkema Jenkins & Co (the large fold-out and then the little postcard of the suitcase), and Angie Smith at Humble Arts Foundation.

These are from a recent visit to Chelsea, when I got a good collection of show take aways, even though a few of the places I looked at didn’t have anything for me to hang on to, like for the Nan Goldin stuff at Matthew Marks.

Taken at MoMA’s Jeff Wall Exhibition. It runs February 25th-May 14th, 2007.

On the NYC subway trains for the last few weeks, I’ve been seeing MoMA’s back-lit ads for the Jeff Wall engagement, which is cheeky. I was glad to finally see the show, although it was a bit under-whelming. Walking through the photos, I felt more than ever that there’s a lot of deliberate consistency in his work, and maybe that undermines presenting such a large group of his photos. The large size is like a salty dish on your tongue. It creates a strong reaction the first time around, but then each successive bite burns out your taste-buds until everything else on your plate loses flavor and you crave a fresh drink.

I picked up some William Eggleston postcards from the International Center for Photography, when I went to see the Cartier-Bresson scrapbooks. I’ve got these iconic Eggleston shots in books already, but sometimes you need some extra bite-sized travel snacks, just in case.