Installation view, Luhring Augustine Chelsea
Luhring Augustine opened a unexpectedly strong group photo show on April 25 at their flagship Chelsea location, an exhibition that feels refreshingly light in comparison to the sometimes operatic heaviness of their gesamkunstwerk video installations. The aesthetic, nevertheless, is a clear extension of the gallery’s consistent vision: a probing for moments in which the magic of the infinite bursts through the cracks of everyday life (see prior examples in the work of Guido Van Der Werve, Ragnar Kjartansson and Pipilotti Rist). The present show takes its title takes from a famed Diane Arbus line about taking pictures and pilfering late night Oreos, which generalizes into a loose organizing principle for curators Sasha Helinski and Lauren Wittels to showcase a number of emerging photographers alongside more established peers.
The exhibition features a number of still life and domestic scenes with laden with art historical overtones, a common enough genre but largely well executed in the present show. Shaun Pierson is representative of this lane: table-top arrangements that resemble new wave Dutch stilleven, reversed portrait sessions where he is photographed being photographed by his subjects, and an unforgettable nude silhouette replete with oversized cowboy hat. These works are complemented by the more allusive touch of Sheida Soleimani, an Iranian-American artist and activist who has gained widespread recognition for her assembled photographic collages and tableaux. Touchstones from her Iranian immigrant heritage are present in a number of these meditative compositions, as are affective similarities with the works of Man Ray and Charles Wilson Peele. Shadows, flatness and pictorial space swirling around a memory almost able to be articulated.
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