Speed Reviews 2: The Fabricators

Who said that the camera never lies? Herewith, four photographers whose work is all about fiction and fantasy.

The Looking Glass: Starting with photographs of high-end department store windows, Lynn Goldsmith manipulates the scene by adding and subtracting objects. To finish it off, she dresses herself up in full mannequin garb (including the blank stare) and Photoshops herself into the scene. According to the gallery notes, these images occupy some pretty well-trod post-modernist terrain, i.e., “questions of identity and how it is constructed.” Whatever, these Baroque photographs are a hoot although you’ve got to wonder just how long they’ll hold your interest. 

(Jenkins Johnson Gallery, 21 West 26)

Untold Stories: Aiming for a Chandleresque atmosphere, Jonathan Smith’s riffs on film noir are hit or miss. He’s got the setting down, the narratives are suitably enigmatic, but he left me wanting. Maybe the sets were too elegant (shouldn’t noir feel like a trip to the wrong side of the tracks?) or maybe the mysteries aren’t shady enough. For me, the most successful were those that took the longest view: the peeping Tom’s view of a woman in her apartment; the neon sign encircled by a stand of trees; the glimpse, from across the tracks, of a woman waiting for the night train.

(Rick Wester Fine Art, 511 West 25)

Generations / Brothers & Sisters: Ruud van Empel channels Henri Rousseau in his images of black children in jungle settings and school photographers in his group portraits. These images are flagrant fabrications – and we’re meant to read them as such. As the gallery notes put it, they’re about “the disruption of apparently straightforward meaning.” But while Van Empel certainly creates convincingly “constructed” portraits, I wasn’t entirely convinced by the gallery’s contention that these photographs capture the children’s “existential discomfort” as they approach the disrupting age of puberty. 

(Stefan Stux Gallery, 530 West 25)

Line-Up: There must be something in the air. Julie Blackmon is also Photoshopping kids – although, at least to my eye, to more convincing effect than van Empel. Blackmon’s inspiration is the 17^th-century genre paintings of Jan Steen, but the influence is subtle – you don’t need to know the connection to appreciate the images. Blackmon’s production values are slick – you’re meant to see the art direction – but the kids are unruly little anarchists, whose antics go unnoticed by the clueless adults. My favorite? High Dive, in which the grown-ups linger over their leisurely twilight picnic, while the kids hurl their plastic dolls off the nearby balcony and Barbies spike in the lawn. 

(Robert Mann Gallery, 210 Eleventh Avenue)