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more Me than mine
Miranda Lichtenstein
The edges of Miranda Lichtenstein's new photographs are indeterminate, though not in a physical sense. Instead each intuits a series of questions surrounding their making, at the center of which is: what point does an artwork become a subject, or an object? These works result from a two year engagement with the work of fellow New York artist Josh Blackwell, unfolding as part-dialogue, part-homage, and part - obsession, all the while maintaining their own autonomy as artworks.
Like most of Lichtenstein's photographs, they are shot in a small corner of her studio with mirrors and paper screens, treated as malleably as their original materials. For years, Blackwell has been embellishing the ubiquitous detritus of our contemporary society, plastic bags, through intricate yarn embroidery, laser cutting, and the physical fusing of multiple elements. Originally begun as a collaborative effort, Blackwell's work recedes in the narrowness of the camera's viewfinder - this intuitive process of selection favoring Lichtenstein's own subjectivity.
The resultant images are records of her own engagement with Blackwell's painting-sculpture hybrids. They're cropped and enlarged to a scale outside themselves, depicted in fragments with a tactility that mimics our own relationship to the material, something we handle potentially even more than each other. Works like Thank You inhabit a pop sensibility, flattering and recasting the bag's familiar text (that has been degraded in Blackwell's work) as a slogan simultaneously peppy and pessimistic, as if the plastic bag itself were aware of its snide humor as a positive and friendly pollutant. Photographs of Blackwell's Bodega bags alternatively work to inflate their eponymous subjects, giving otherwise flattened works volume, form, coupled with the passage of light. Plastic appears simultaneously fleeting and disposable, as well as monolithic in its permanence and recurrence.
These investigations place Lichtenstein's works within a complicated though often overlooked history of photography's relationship to sculpture, specifically that of artists photographing their own work or other artists work. Lichtenstein points to Man Ray's photograph Dust Breeders, a long exposure of dust gathered on Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass in his New York apartment as being fundamental to this - it's an instance in which a photographic representation divorces itself from the parameters of the work it depicts. A similar operation is enacted in the work of Louise Lawler, in which works themselves fade deeply into the networks and associations they inhabit. Through this, the artwork itself becomes its own kind of found object, one replete with signifiers. This does not diminish its original authorship, but instead affirms the artworks' status as contemporary artifacts of our time, that can be used to develop understandings outside and further than itself.
Throughout the works complicated twists of ownerships and authorships (in most images, Blackwell's work as rendered is nearly unrecognizable), what remains at its core is the generative affinities and admirations that emerge between artists. Underscoring this is the exhibition's sole collaborative work, Welcome Water, a sprawling pile of outsized prints of Blackwell's work. Scanned, and in some instances pieced together by Lichtenstein, each element displays a hyper level of detailing with a space foreign to the photographic image. Translated and transformed by the light of the scanner bed, they spread and expand across the gallery floor - edges overlap, and individual elements blur into a new whole. Mimicking the operation of Lichtenstein's own photographs, the work apparent mutability functions as an outpouring of generosity, and speaks to a malleability of objects and ideas that remains separate from the authors.
Alex Fitzgerald
November 21 - December 19, 2015
