I know the I Heart Photography blog doesn’t exist anymore,
but man, would Laurel Ptak love this show. Lots of what look like shards of
pictures, maybe some negatives, caught in midair in front of a white seamless.
I think that’s what it is, but they are so still, maybe there is something more
digital happening? Also some images that look like image shards lying flat on a
piece of glass, maybe? and some straight collages. These are all combined with
some slightly more traditional pictures of the world (kind of). There is a
death mask (?) fading away into a pink-white haze and a poloroaid of a light in
the darkness over a floral print material or a woman with a pink sunburned back
in front of powder blue surface. Now, the pictures have a refined palate that hinges
on whites and some spring-like pastels, and they certainly push alternate-process
work in a very refined direction. But like most photographic abstraction, which
dominates the show, they tend to assimilate, the more traditional photographs into
an abstract installation. I am just not sure what the work is about. It feels
well crafted and attractive, but I wish there was something more substantial to
grab onto. The PR talks about the work as experiments and investigations, which
could just be lazy PR writing, but the work feels exploratory, little glimpses
of ideas that would make for a great tumblr, but images that haven’t resolved
those investigation into any overarching content. And that’s what I would hope would
be the goal, especially when you’re at the point of your career when you’re in
a ground floor Chelsea gallery. But that being said the work unquestionably
feels contemporary, and it is good to see that a couple of times a year Silverstein
breaks down and does a contemporary photography show.
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