Sunday, April 8, 2012

Katherine Wolkoff, Found @ Sasha Wolf Gallery


I am not sure I am ever going to fully enjoy repetition or minimalism in photography. It appears over and over again, and it’s certainly hard to argue with, say, the power of Sze Tsung Leong’s Horizon pictures, Rineke Dijkstra’s pictures or…. Yeah, see, I have a hard time coming up with a third person. I tend to find Sugimoto, dull and the Bechers just doesn’t hold my interest. Having just read Leong’s essay in Words Without Pictures on the subject, I am still unconvinced. It’s the same problem I have with Kate Wolkof’s silhouetted pictures of taxidermied birds, they are very attractive, and if there were one or two of them mixed into a body of work a la Roe Ethridge, I would certainly like them. But fill the room with them, even with some enjoyable back-story, and I just find my mind wondering, or more specifically my eyes, to the three landscapes included in the show which are undeniably beautiful, particularly the washed-out waves shot from above. Now, why Wolkoff insists on depriving the viewer of more visually exciting images in favor of silhouetted taxidermied birds is beside me. I want an inversion of the ratio of landscapes to silhouetted birds, hell, even going 50-50 on the birds to landscapes, and we would have a pretty great body of work.


Through Apr. 28th

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