Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Lisa Kereszi, The Party’s Over @ Yancey Richardson Gallery



For some time, I’ve mocked Yancey Richardson’s ability to suck the life out of even the most effervescent bodies of work. For the record those days are officially over. Because despite Kereszi’s tendency to create complex formal but occasionally reductively formal pictures, Yancey Richardson was able to put on the best show of Kereszi’s work I’ve ever seen.

In book form, where Kereszi has a little more room to stretch her legs, her more formal, even decorative work recedes into the shadows of stronger narrative images that delve into tawdry strip clubs and haunted houses, reoccurring themes of desperate places that were once purveyors of base entertainment. The Party’s Over (maybe minus the picture of porthole windows) is the best show of her work I’ve ever seen. Almost every photograph contains the remnants of emotionally loaded cultural locations from a strip club’s parking lot to a lake with a large plastic shark behind a bar. Kereszi’s morning-after esthetic has become even more relevant in the continuing economic stagnation, where those who inhabit such places will find themselves for sometime to come, staring at pink walls and forgotten plastic sharks.


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