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Art Review

by Anne Doran

Always the Young Strangers

Time Out New York

6/28/2011

This selection of first-rate work by 16 young artists, all women, shows the universe of photo-based art continuing to expand. Running the gamut from abstract to imagist and from erotic to political, the artworks are conceptually inclined, content oriented and process driven.

Kate Steciw’s photomontage transforms mundane images (a telephone pole, a scraggly flower bed) into an alternate world of unexpected beauty. Women’s bodies appear in Talia Chetrit’s Duchampian Abstract Nude (2010) and in Katherine Hubbard’s sculptural tableaux featuring the performance artist MPA. Photo objects include Aspen Mays’s hole-punched star fields and Letha Wilson’s miniature earthwork: a photograph of Bryce Canyon in Utah set in a box frame and obscured by a spill of real cement.

Of particular note is Andrea Longacre-White’s scan of her iPad. The moving light of the scanner, interacting with smudges left by the artist’s finger on the iPad’s touch screen, forces the device to revisit its Web-browser history a high-tech version of Roland Barthes’s punctum. Another standout is LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photolithograph of a fund-raising letter for a community hospital. It is the artist’s bitter response to Levi’s creepily postapocalyptic and tone-deaf Ready to Work commercial, shot by John Hillcoat (who also directed The Road) in Frazier’s economically distressed hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Drawing variously from analog and digital photo technologies, painting, performance and sculpture, the works in this terrific show put a fresh, feminist spin on questions of truth, objectivity and perception.

 

More information available at: http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/art/1624527/review-%E2%80%9Calways-the-young-strangers%E2%80%9D