Sunday, February 3, 2008

Creative destruction

I saw some intriguing work at Peer Gallery on Saturday by Chris McCaw (http://www.peergallery.com/). Mr. McCaw was the beneficiary of a fortuitous accident. He fell asleep at the beach while his camera shutter was open and set to infinity. He woke up to find his camera smoking. The lens had caught the sun at a particular angle allowing it to act as a magnifying glass. The resulting focused light actually burned through the film in the camera. He started to play with the process which brought him to this work where he loads the camera with photo paper rather than film. The camera obscura image that results is literally burned by the light. What seems like a Lucio Fontana-like slash across the paper has been produced entirely photographically. Really fun and beautiful.

I seem to be attracted to this kind of artistic destruction lately. Marco Breuer's work is an obvious parallel. Though very different in process and look, they share a gleeful disregard for the surface of the paper. I love his abstractions and erased-through workings. Also, I mentioned Felix Schramm in a previous post from Miami. His torn and collaged photos from installations that themselves seem torn and collaged are very strong and somehow in the same world.

Not a photograph, but very much in my eye these days is the work of Nancy Brooks Brody. I saw her sewn drawings in Miami at Virgil de Voldere Gallery in Miami Pulse, and then again at the best of 2007 show at White Columns.When I visited the gallery in New York, I was treated to work on paper that had been torn in two then stapled or sewn back together. The allegory of a wound so jaggedly repaired is difficult to look at. Though it's just paper, it seems raw and human. Well worth looking at. http://www.virgilgallery.com/v2/

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