TIME OUT NEW YORK Art Reviews

2007: Babette Mangolte, Peter Coffin, Liz Deschenes, Justine Kurland, Tacita Dean, Shannon Ebner.

2008:

"Eat the Document"
Larissa Goldston, through Feb 23

Most Bob Dylan fans have heard of his 1966 tour documentary Eat the Document, but few have actually seen it. By dramatizing some of its scenes, Todd Haynes’s recent anti-biopic I’m Not There renewed interest in Dylan’s flick, giving some hope that it may soon be released on DVD. Until then, we can settle for another “Eat the Document,” a group show of four artists that, like Haynes’s film, toes a precarious line between looking archival and new.

Also like I’m Not There, the works in this show negotiate elements of process and performance. Last spring, in “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975” at the National Academy Museum, Alan Shields’s multihued dome-shaped canvases set on the floor engaged space through a physical playfulness. His work here, Ajax (1972–73), is an equally interesting massive circular structure hanging from the ceiling, composed of strips of painted canvas, glass beads and threads. Several works by young artists A.K. Burns and Eileen Quinlan also push at abstraction and illusion in extreme ways, making nice bedfellows with Shields’s work. Quinlan’s “Smoke and Mirrors” series (2005–2007) is made up of atmospheric photographs of saturated light, pieces of broken glass and scratched negatives and, you guessed it, smoke and mirrors

In the second gallery, a group of photographs by Jimmy De Sana is a welcome treat, even if they seem to stray slightly from the show’s theme. De Sana’s perverse and colorful images, all dated 1980, influenced other photographers who turned their cameras on themselves to create dramatic and abject scenes, including Cindy Sherman. Smartly eschewing a nostalgic tone, “Eat the Document” surveys several overlooked and emerging practices, while offering a refreshing, if not wide-eyed, take on experimentation.

 

Cristina Lei Rodriguez
Team Gallery, through Feb 16

If you didn’t get enough of the latest in funky new sculpture at the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” show, you’re in for a treat with Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s debut solo exhibit at Team Gallery. Her outsize assemblages employ seemingly discarded materials, just like Isa Genzken’s colorful, haphazard pieces—only Rodriguez uses artificial foliage and paint to evoke a tropical forest gone haywire.

“Overrun” is a series of treelike sculptures, the largest of which are 12 feet tall; they’re coated in several layers of vibrant epoxy paint and shiny plastic jewels, including hanging strands of gold chains. Another group, “Contained,” consists of six Plexiglas boxes installed on a wall, each filled with fake ferns and other plants. From a distance, the cases look like toxic terraria, but on closer inspection, it’s easy to identify their phony nature.

Based in Miami, Rodriguez seems engaged and repulsed by the environment she works in—a place where afternoon thunderstorms can make everything appear brighter and greener, and the landscape starts to feel sickeningly ripe. This overly humid ambience is present in her installations, though they also allude to South Florida’s expanding urban environment: Abandoned, a heap of scrubby flora on a foam base, is reminiscent of vistas visible from the region’s never-ending highways, where grassland is covered in oil and garbage. By representing these surroundings in ways both metaphoric and literal, Rodriguez creates sculptures that are striking and grotesque, verdant and withering, seemingly real and manufactured all at once.

 

Donelle Woolford
Wallspace, through Feb 16

Gallery handouts aren’t my favorite reading, but the one accompanying Donelle Woolford’s first solo show caught my eye. Titled Donelle Woolford: Responsibility and Insincerity, it was written by Ralph Ellison and Maria Gilissen (widow of Marcel Broodthaers)—my first inkling that something was fishy about Woolford, a female African-American artist who works in Harlem. My second clue was this puzzling mishmash of a show: The first gallery contains a large tropical plant surrounded by ten Cubist-inspired collages made of rough scraps of wood, while the second space features a grainy slide show of African sculptures interspersed with works by Picasso and Braque. After grilling the staff, I discovered Woolford’s secret. (Warning: Spoilers follow.)

Woolford is the alter ego of New Haven artist Joe Scanlan, who, besides being white, has an ongoing interest in consumerism and fabrication. Playing off Cubism’s centennial anniversary, and mixing in a splash of postmodernism, Scanlan takes the current state of identity politics and runs with it.

Fake personae are nothing new in art (see the career of Marcel Duchamp), but the salient difference here is Scanlan’s racial forgery, as if he’s attempting to reclaim Cubism’s African heritage. The marginal, cast-off quality of the collages and the critical overtones of the installation suggest as much, but his objects are far less interesting than the questions they raise: Is this a stab at fame? Blatant exoticism? Or is Scanlan taking a page from Broodthaers by creating an elaborate stage set where artworks function as props? It’s difficult to unravel his intentions entirely, but they do make you wonder: Is nothing shocking?

 

Katy Grannan
Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, through Feb 16
Salon 94 Freemans, through Feb 24

Many people leave New York for California to become someone else; perhaps more of them should read Joan Didion. She once described San Bernardino as “a place where little is bright or graceful, where it is routine to misplace the future and easy to start looking for it in bed.” In 2005, photographer Katy Grannan moved from New York to San Francisco, and in this pair of solo shows, she presents a trio of subjects who at once challenge and confirm Didion’s observation.

Uptown, at Greenberg Van Doren, images of Nicole, a woman with whom Grannan worked for almost three years, are distressing. Lounging in a parking lot and in bed, naked on the beach and reaching states of ecstasy in a meadow of wildflowers, Nicole is the sort of complex character we’ve all known, a self-annihilating shape-shifter whose mood changes as often as her haircut. Grannan portrays her in effervescent sunshine, flaws and all. Downtown, at Salon 94 Freemans, Grannan focuses her lens on Gail and Dale, best-friend transsexuals who pose against California’s rugged coast while wearing ghastly dresses and heavy make-up. In the past, Grannan snapped strangers in the quotidian confines of their homes, but here, her emphasis is on transformation and living on the edge.

If it’s true that Americans move west to reinvent themselves, this transition has served Grannan nicely. Her latest pictures clearly shift into new directions without sacrificing the allure that makes her work so haunting.