Misc.: December 2005 Archives
Like last year, I have to note that this is a purely personal list, the volume of great work that passes through NYC each year is enormous and my free time for gallery visits is severely limited. That said, here's my top picks for the year.
10 Kim Keever at Feigen Contemporary
Keever’s smoky dioramas explore the visual language of the 19th century, a time when the chores traditionally serviced by painting began to be transferred to the camera.
9 Robbert Flick at Robert Mann and Gallery 339
Unknown to me until this year, Flick’s various projects got well deserved exposure on both coasts and served as a personal inspiration in my own work.
8 Thomas Allen at Foley Gallery
Allen’s macro photography using pulp novels and other printed material brings a sense of humor to the often dour-faced gallery scene.
7 Justine Cooper at Kashya Hildebrand
Showing the inner workings of the American Museum of Natural History, Cooper’s photographs of bottled specimens and stuffed animals mirror the suspended animation of a photograph – freezing life into a semblance of its former animation.
6 Thomas Struth at Marianne Goodman
Struth makes the audience his subject, leaving the artistic object off-frame. Any artist would be proud to elicit the wide mouthed gaping David draws, even after several hundred years.
5 David Maisel at Von Lintel
Maisel’s aerial study of the life and death of California’s desert lakes are so astonishingly colored you might suspect some dark room trickery. But the straight approach renders the abstraction all the more stunning.
4 Clifford Ross at Sonnabend
I didn't get a chance to write up this show, but Ross’s Mountain series is a technical tour de force. The largest of large-scale color prints, Ross demonstrates an amazing mastery of light, particularly in the two major triptychs in this show.
3 Stephen Shore at PS1
I must own up to having not actually seen this show, but Shore’s work was ever-present this year and his American Surfaces is an important contribution to American photographic arts. At the very least, every photoblogger is his spiritual child. (This opinion is based on the photos I saw at Edwynn Houk Gallery.)
2 Edward Burtynsky at Brooklyn Museum of Art
Burtynsky’s documentary work of China’s explosive expansion into a global economic superpower perfectly matches style and subject. The eco-theme of previous work is a subtext here, and Burtynsky has unconsciously transformed himself into a sort of Lewis Hine.
1 The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes at International Center of Photography and George Eastman House
The vivid, brilliant photographs in this show open a window on another time, one of the best goals of photography – illuminating the lives of others separated from you by time, distance or culture. ICP did a masterful job hanging the daguerreotypes which are notoriously difficult to view.
Compare this list with last year’s top 10. Feel free to list your picks/pans in the comments.
Gallery Hopper is now available as part of the "Blogs On Demand" service from Newstex. The Newstex feed contains the full content of each post, including images and hypertext links. This site is growing up and has new responsibilities (gotta keep posting to keep the paying customers happy!)
Sorry posts have been light of late. I'm having trouble with the server that's hosting the site. Hope to have things running smoothly any minute now. Comments are broken. In the mean time, here are some interesting links I ran across in the last few days.
The latest issue of AK47.tv is out. This one contains a series by Eliot Shepard and Stuart O'Sullivan among others.
Article about Samuel H. Gottscho's architectural photography, a sampling of which is on display at the Museum of the City of New York. (via Coudal)
Round up of this year's art criticism books, an interesting overview of the recent history of criticism. This is an area I'm not so familiar with, but strangely my own thinking is somewhat in sync with.
