Janine Antoni
Luhring Augustine
Up Against
September 12-October 24
In Up Against, Janine Antoni pulls at the frayed edges of the female identity string both figuratively and literally. It starts with a single squared 15 inch digital c-print of a dark-haired baby in pink clothes, sitting in her high-chair using her orange plastic spoon to feed the belly button in the middle of her mother’s protruding stomach. Next, a slightly larger c-print called Conduit offers a fantastical view of Antoni holding a phallic, copper gargoyle in two hands under her hiked-up dress to pee through onto the New York skyline from the top of a skyscraper. The facing wall is lined with a row of crotch-height white podiums that support an oxidized collection of these gargoyles leering off the right hand corners. Subsequently, a darkened tunnel leads to a spot-lit, lead wrecking ball, damaged from use and ruminating in the wake of a hazel-brown eye projected on the back wall, which blinks to the sound of each wrecking ball hit; a sound that reverberates through the entire exhibition. Finally, in a crucifixion and a pièta called Inhabit, Antoni dominates the last room in a life-size print, her body harnessed at the crux of splayed white ropes which suspend her figure over a child’s room. On her lower half she wears a doll house, her legs cutting through the delicate, modern rooms like fleshy tree trunks. On the adjacent walls, two blurred prints selectively focus on a spider web which decorates the doll house’s tiny kitchen, complete with a live, brown spider.
At first, this progression and ubiquitous symbolism can feel disparate, and leave a viewer disoriented and annoyed. The gratuitous sexual references? The soft focus on motherhood? More religious symbolism? Another woman blathering on abstractly about what it means to be a woman? But does reinterpreting ever really get old? From the line of the baby’s orange spoon to mother’s round stomach and the curving stream of piss, to the lines and circles of the wrecking ball and iris, and finally the webs, Antoni isn’t just trying to re-define the old universal symbols of divine femininity —she’s stringing it all together. This show is quiet, resonant, subversive, sweet, mystical, and nurturing. It embodies the need to hold it all together in the face of feeling torn apart by what defines us. Antoni refuses and accepts all that she is Up Against, and it is refreshing to not have to choose.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Generation Everything
The Generational: Younger Than Jesus
The New Museum
April 4 – July 5, 2009
On the elevator ride up to the New Museum’s 5th floor to start my descent through the many levels of the exhibition, I overheard a conversation between the two forty something hipsters behind me. The woman was describing how a mutual friend had caught his wife in an affair by searching through her phone records. As we all stepped off the elevator she said, “I never in a million years would have thought to do that! I mean, isn’t that extraordinary?” I immediately thought to myself, I absolutely would have thought of that - I’ve seen it done a thousand times before, and realized abruptly that, that may very well be what separates my generation from hers: the smug cynicism of a “have it all/seen it all” mentality.
In The Generational :Younger than Jesus, this youthfully condescending attitude is well represented to the inclusion of little else. The show contains a mash-up of pop culture with various styles from the history of 20th century art, without much thought to the meaning of either element. Born in 1980, I am the median age for artists in this targeted group show and I felt a shameful connection to the fragmented, confused, cluster-@$*%! on display. We are a generation that has been taught to do it faster, like the group AIDS-3D’s OMG Obelisk, which tries to generate a conflict between a popular text message abbreviation and ideas about worship and religion through a stoic black rectangle topped with glowing letters, surrounded by odd little glow ended line sculptures that comes off as cheesy and simple minded. We are a generation who has been taught to look to the past, like Josh Smith’s wall gridded with poster-like paintings that represent little more than a teenager’s willful reinterpretation of abstract expressionism or Chu Yun’s contrived meditation on vulnerability through a series of drugged, sleeping women; an archetype in the history of performance art. We are a generation who has been taught to embrace technology, evident in the pervasive amount of video and web based art which ranges from Faye Driscoll’s tiny screen full of pointless, vogue, stop motion dance to Cory Archangel’s glib, wall consuming, blue photo-shopped screen, to Anna Molska’s weird, homo-erotic, wall projection of buff men in almost nothing but archaic soldier’s helmets arbitrarily pushing around large geometric pieces to an equally arbitrary soundtrack of upbeat bleeps.
The show stopper, however, is Ryan Trecartin’s centrally located video/sculpture piece which turns the tables by commenting on youth culture in a way that psychologically encompasses the failings of his present company. Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B) is a deeply satirized vision of reality tv, my space, and their self-indulgent solitude, that looks a lot like a bizzaro episode of MTV’s The Real World; a show our generation was raised on. The characters are ridiculous to the point of ingenious with their painted, gentrified faces, excessive slang, and slothful over attention to fashionable, self centered, emptiness. Set in two rooms, ludicrously overstuffed with fragmented, mismatched furniture and items that feel like a packrat’s first one bedroom apartment, the piece’s insanity is pitch-perfect. Trecartin succeeds where others fail because he uses the short hand of a generation to describe it instead of pick it apart.
But in the end, even all of these observations on generational attitudes and tendencies through the filter of this show are unreliable. Doesn’t it seem a little soon to be summing up an entire generation that has just barely moved out of its parent’s basement? And The New Museum’s method of weaning out “the” artists through the recommendations of curators seems more like a bad commentary on the failings of our art system’s tendency toward commodification and authoritative elitism than a faithful documentation. The set up is contrived to sell museum tickets to a generation of egocentric consumers, who are guaranteed to love the attention.
The New Museum
April 4 – July 5, 2009
On the elevator ride up to the New Museum’s 5th floor to start my descent through the many levels of the exhibition, I overheard a conversation between the two forty something hipsters behind me. The woman was describing how a mutual friend had caught his wife in an affair by searching through her phone records. As we all stepped off the elevator she said, “I never in a million years would have thought to do that! I mean, isn’t that extraordinary?” I immediately thought to myself, I absolutely would have thought of that - I’ve seen it done a thousand times before, and realized abruptly that, that may very well be what separates my generation from hers: the smug cynicism of a “have it all/seen it all” mentality.
In The Generational :Younger than Jesus, this youthfully condescending attitude is well represented to the inclusion of little else. The show contains a mash-up of pop culture with various styles from the history of 20th century art, without much thought to the meaning of either element. Born in 1980, I am the median age for artists in this targeted group show and I felt a shameful connection to the fragmented, confused, cluster-@$*%! on display. We are a generation that has been taught to do it faster, like the group AIDS-3D’s OMG Obelisk, which tries to generate a conflict between a popular text message abbreviation and ideas about worship and religion through a stoic black rectangle topped with glowing letters, surrounded by odd little glow ended line sculptures that comes off as cheesy and simple minded. We are a generation who has been taught to look to the past, like Josh Smith’s wall gridded with poster-like paintings that represent little more than a teenager’s willful reinterpretation of abstract expressionism or Chu Yun’s contrived meditation on vulnerability through a series of drugged, sleeping women; an archetype in the history of performance art. We are a generation who has been taught to embrace technology, evident in the pervasive amount of video and web based art which ranges from Faye Driscoll’s tiny screen full of pointless, vogue, stop motion dance to Cory Archangel’s glib, wall consuming, blue photo-shopped screen, to Anna Molska’s weird, homo-erotic, wall projection of buff men in almost nothing but archaic soldier’s helmets arbitrarily pushing around large geometric pieces to an equally arbitrary soundtrack of upbeat bleeps.
The show stopper, however, is Ryan Trecartin’s centrally located video/sculpture piece which turns the tables by commenting on youth culture in a way that psychologically encompasses the failings of his present company. Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B) is a deeply satirized vision of reality tv, my space, and their self-indulgent solitude, that looks a lot like a bizzaro episode of MTV’s The Real World; a show our generation was raised on. The characters are ridiculous to the point of ingenious with their painted, gentrified faces, excessive slang, and slothful over attention to fashionable, self centered, emptiness. Set in two rooms, ludicrously overstuffed with fragmented, mismatched furniture and items that feel like a packrat’s first one bedroom apartment, the piece’s insanity is pitch-perfect. Trecartin succeeds where others fail because he uses the short hand of a generation to describe it instead of pick it apart.
But in the end, even all of these observations on generational attitudes and tendencies through the filter of this show are unreliable. Doesn’t it seem a little soon to be summing up an entire generation that has just barely moved out of its parent’s basement? And The New Museum’s method of weaning out “the” artists through the recommendations of curators seems more like a bad commentary on the failings of our art system’s tendency toward commodification and authoritative elitism than a faithful documentation. The set up is contrived to sell museum tickets to a generation of egocentric consumers, who are guaranteed to love the attention.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
In the End.
Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867–1947)
Self Portrait, ca. 1938–40
Oil on canvas; 30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 61 cm)
Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Purchased 1972
© 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
www.metmuseum.org
Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
January 27 – April 19 2009
Pierre Bonnard’s interior paintings from the last twenty years of his life are so lusciously radiant it is easy to get caught up in the color and miss what is insubstantial, and more important. Like Monet, whose late works leaned toward belligerent, linear insanity due to his failing eyesight, and Louis Wain whose illustrations of cats turned into sinister, kaleidoscopic patterns as he succumbed to schizophrenia; Bonnard’s late in life works feel more like a charged descent from his more famous earlier works. This collection represents distortion at the hands of depression and loss, not ingenuity through bright palate.
Much like the work of Matisse, who was painting in a similar style during this same period in history, Bonnard’s paintings from this late period are more about patterns than subjects. The difference between someone like Bonnard and someone like Matisse, however, is that while Matisse focused decidedly on using his abstraction definitively, with distinct, bold colors, heavy outlines and a concentrated simplicity; Bonnard is comparatively messy, hazy and indecisive. It is the repetitive actions of his messy lines and bold colors that force his subjects into an oblivion of abstraction. In The White Interior, for example, the bent figure (assumably Bonnard’s wife Marthe) is nearly indistinguishable from the floor; the salmon-navy speckles of the rug synonymous with her clothing. The table, doors and windows jut out in blinding, but muddled white competing in intensity with the dark blotches of plant life outside and in, while the lighter outlines of the dishware on the table barely resist a dappled unity with the tablecloth. The effect is aggressive, but so universally aggressive that no one element separates itself from the whole; there are no centers of interest, just one big mess of equally active lines and colors competing with each other in a way that is visually stimulating and mentally exhausting.
Despite the pervasiveness of subjects such as bowls of fruit and food, books, papers, furniture and plant life, Bonnard’s people are the most interesting. In Flowers on the Mantelpiece at Le Cannet a woman stands with her back to us, hand on the mantelpiece dissected by the edge of the canvas. Her face, turned only slightly inward, as if resisting a glace over her shoulder, suggests her tense awareness of the viewer’s eyes on her. In Before Dinner, two female figures stand to the back and the side of the canvas, looking dartingly downward and away, also aware of a viewer whose eyes they shamefully refuse to meet. Each figure is pushed into the background behind huge tables of food, overly detailed bouquets of flowers and immense windows. They hover, alienated from themselves and each other, around the edges of the interiors of their lives; conceding their significance to the inanimate objects that represent them.
Finally, and most tellingly, are Bonnard’s paintings of himself from the very final years of his life. Each of the medium sized paintings features Bonnard cropped just below the shoulders, staring back at the viewer. His sunken features and upturned eyebrows punctuated by the mottled, dysfunctional mess of his hands. He is a pathetic creature. These paintings lack the color variation so predominant in the rest of the show, mainly comprised of fleshy tones in pasty pink and sallow yellow. Bonnard’s pained face fades into the color of the background as though he is disintegrating before the viewer’s eyes. In the context of these paintings this show seems less about Bonnard’s last move toward sumptuous, overwhelming abstraction than it is about his feelings as a man at the end of his life. His beloved wife gone, his resources waning, his health failing, he painted his life as he saw it—as a unity of ordinary things estranged from, and blurring into themselves and then, into non-existence. The work is hard on the senses for its assertive abstraction and movements toward immateriality, but keep your eyes on the canvas and you’ll see Bonnard’s ability to immortalize his own decline in a way that stands outside of time.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Defining Absence
Yoshitomo Nara
February 28 – March 28, 2009
Marianne Boesky Gallery
I’ve been wondering for a little while now why Yoshitomo Nara’s work is so unsettling. Large cartoon paintings of little girls with jelly bean heads, sculpted bob hairdos, and oversized eyes hardly seems like subject matter that should evoke uneasiness. They look more like the diary drawings of an eight year old girl with all their variations of sass, boredom, violence and silliness, than the latest additions in the career of a middle aged Japanese man.
The front two rooms of the gallery are filled with drawings and paintings large enough to fill a mantle piece, small enough to fold up and put in your pocket, and everywhere in between. The drawings are more active with evocative text like, the massive “Rock’n Roll The Roll” in lipstick red graffiti featuring a lumpy headed girl with hips angled out strumming her little figure-eight shaped guitar. The tops of her eyes slanted down and her frowning line mouth half open indicates her aggressive concentration, while action lines and musical notes project out from her. Coffee table book sized drawings in pencil feature girls in plain outlined square dresses with half circle poesy collars and blank backgrounds. They arbitrarily sit in a chair, wear a round nose and whiskers, and stare from underneath a heavy shock of long line hair with words like “Creep” and “NYC” around and on them. In poster sized acrylic paintings the girls are cut off just below the white collar and stare silently through vacuous circle eyes of blue-grey or emerald-gold or stick out a pink tongue from a disk slot mouth under the curved lines to indicate closed lids. The back room is even more off-putting with two cobble wood shingled turret cottages, one filled with colorful stuffed animals and a roof pointing up through the ceiling, the other broken or burned off at the top housing a small living space with a tiny desk, drawing materials and radio/cd player. A painting fills the back wall of the stuffed animal cottage looming over the interior space like an alter the toys worship and in the other small drawings, stuck up haphazardly, seem like the products of the non-existent occupant.
Despite the variety of poses and the subtle variation between size, detail and action, these little girls always have one thing in common: their monumental absence. The exhibition feels like a voyeuristic peek into a culture of little humanoid creatures who could be gone for an hour or forever. They stare at us through images made mostly of simple lines that indicate feelings but their eyes, actions and dwellings are empty of anything but semblance. The rooms of the show are sterilized, desensitized, filled with sentimental objects that have been stripped of their sentiment. It makes me uneasy but intrigued by both the creatures themselves and what Nara might be saying about our ideological, image hungry culture through them: in the absence of something real in life, emotion or depiction what is there? Does it do us harm or pleasure?
February 28 – March 28, 2009
Marianne Boesky Gallery
I’ve been wondering for a little while now why Yoshitomo Nara’s work is so unsettling. Large cartoon paintings of little girls with jelly bean heads, sculpted bob hairdos, and oversized eyes hardly seems like subject matter that should evoke uneasiness. They look more like the diary drawings of an eight year old girl with all their variations of sass, boredom, violence and silliness, than the latest additions in the career of a middle aged Japanese man.
The front two rooms of the gallery are filled with drawings and paintings large enough to fill a mantle piece, small enough to fold up and put in your pocket, and everywhere in between. The drawings are more active with evocative text like, the massive “Rock’n Roll The Roll” in lipstick red graffiti featuring a lumpy headed girl with hips angled out strumming her little figure-eight shaped guitar. The tops of her eyes slanted down and her frowning line mouth half open indicates her aggressive concentration, while action lines and musical notes project out from her. Coffee table book sized drawings in pencil feature girls in plain outlined square dresses with half circle poesy collars and blank backgrounds. They arbitrarily sit in a chair, wear a round nose and whiskers, and stare from underneath a heavy shock of long line hair with words like “Creep” and “NYC” around and on them. In poster sized acrylic paintings the girls are cut off just below the white collar and stare silently through vacuous circle eyes of blue-grey or emerald-gold or stick out a pink tongue from a disk slot mouth under the curved lines to indicate closed lids. The back room is even more off-putting with two cobble wood shingled turret cottages, one filled with colorful stuffed animals and a roof pointing up through the ceiling, the other broken or burned off at the top housing a small living space with a tiny desk, drawing materials and radio/cd player. A painting fills the back wall of the stuffed animal cottage looming over the interior space like an alter the toys worship and in the other small drawings, stuck up haphazardly, seem like the products of the non-existent occupant.
Despite the variety of poses and the subtle variation between size, detail and action, these little girls always have one thing in common: their monumental absence. The exhibition feels like a voyeuristic peek into a culture of little humanoid creatures who could be gone for an hour or forever. They stare at us through images made mostly of simple lines that indicate feelings but their eyes, actions and dwellings are empty of anything but semblance. The rooms of the show are sterilized, desensitized, filled with sentimental objects that have been stripped of their sentiment. It makes me uneasy but intrigued by both the creatures themselves and what Nara might be saying about our ideological, image hungry culture through them: in the absence of something real in life, emotion or depiction what is there? Does it do us harm or pleasure?
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Artistic Vision
It’s Grey, It’s Grey
Dave Hardy
March 20 – May 2, 2009
Art in General
It seems like every really great piece of art puts you in a place where it is impossible to exactly describe that point of tension between what the work is doing to you and what it is. Confronted with Dave Hardy’s towering, room length wall of chocolaty vinyl wood shingles obscuring blinding tubes of white neon light, it’s impossible not to feel that tension.
The work could easily be called an odd, post modern take on the conflict between anti-minimalism vs. minimalism: think Eva Hesse vs. Sol Lewitt or Dan Flavin. But the departure is in the way these elements of anti-minimal and minimal combine; purity of obstruction meeting purity of abstraction is such an earnest sight. Hardy has created a spectacle that mediates two ideas so perfectly that the conflict between them is equally as perfect.
One can’t help but wonder if Hardy himself is fully aware of what he’s done. The impression given by the press release is that the work exists in his mind not as an action but as a symbol. The glowing light represents an undefined interior, while the hand made plastic shingles are a metaphor for mass production. In other words, Hardy sees his visual collision as more of an idea about collision and not an action before his viewer. If he wanted us to see a representation of ambiguity, he probably should have left the neon at home. The war between light and dark alone leaves no room for uncertainty and even less room for speculation. This piece is all about the visual impact and the uninterrupted experience. It is the viewer reveling in the light of discovery and equally wrestling with the darkness of imperfection, seamlessly, in the immediacy of one on-going moment. The effect should not be explained, it should be lived.
Dave Hardy
March 20 – May 2, 2009
Art in General
It seems like every really great piece of art puts you in a place where it is impossible to exactly describe that point of tension between what the work is doing to you and what it is. Confronted with Dave Hardy’s towering, room length wall of chocolaty vinyl wood shingles obscuring blinding tubes of white neon light, it’s impossible not to feel that tension.
The work could easily be called an odd, post modern take on the conflict between anti-minimalism vs. minimalism: think Eva Hesse vs. Sol Lewitt or Dan Flavin. But the departure is in the way these elements of anti-minimal and minimal combine; purity of obstruction meeting purity of abstraction is such an earnest sight. Hardy has created a spectacle that mediates two ideas so perfectly that the conflict between them is equally as perfect.
One can’t help but wonder if Hardy himself is fully aware of what he’s done. The impression given by the press release is that the work exists in his mind not as an action but as a symbol. The glowing light represents an undefined interior, while the hand made plastic shingles are a metaphor for mass production. In other words, Hardy sees his visual collision as more of an idea about collision and not an action before his viewer. If he wanted us to see a representation of ambiguity, he probably should have left the neon at home. The war between light and dark alone leaves no room for uncertainty and even less room for speculation. This piece is all about the visual impact and the uninterrupted experience. It is the viewer reveling in the light of discovery and equally wrestling with the darkness of imperfection, seamlessly, in the immediacy of one on-going moment. The effect should not be explained, it should be lived.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Deeply, Satisfyingly, Unattainable
Angelina Nasso
MIWIS
February 26 – April 11, 2009
Winston Wächter Fine Art
The oil paintings in Angelina Nasso’s fourth solo New York show are not a surprise, nor are they surprising to look at. Large and sparingly titled, comprised of warm colors, blotched, blurred and streak-dripping down the paper; it is easy to see why Nasso has had so much success with her style. These paintings are easy on the eyes because they are equally reflective and dense-totally meaningful and completely meaningless. In Untitled #15 thick cascades of white paint hover around large masses of dark color, giving the illusion of depth, but the shapes are shadowy and undefined. Embers #22 is comprised of cloudy, watery patches of blue, violet and green, offset by warm red and yellow subtly draining toward the center of the composition.
Wandering around the gallery makes me feel like a child looking through windows in the rain. Nasso explains her work as reflections on the darkness of her childhood, where out in the Australian wilderness the lack of streetlights made the night into oscillating, pixilated shapes. For me, they are more like a state of deep meditation; the way the world looks when eyes are half open and the mind doesn’t bother to make sense out of the visual world. It is an area in space and time that where thoughts are still and meaning is not yet a tangible thing, only a feeling. It’s the reason Nasso’s paintings are so likable; they connect to the place that exists between consciousness and dreaming, between moment and memory. Their elusive quality is what makes them most appealing.
MIWIS
February 26 – April 11, 2009
Winston Wächter Fine Art
The oil paintings in Angelina Nasso’s fourth solo New York show are not a surprise, nor are they surprising to look at. Large and sparingly titled, comprised of warm colors, blotched, blurred and streak-dripping down the paper; it is easy to see why Nasso has had so much success with her style. These paintings are easy on the eyes because they are equally reflective and dense-totally meaningful and completely meaningless. In Untitled #15 thick cascades of white paint hover around large masses of dark color, giving the illusion of depth, but the shapes are shadowy and undefined. Embers #22 is comprised of cloudy, watery patches of blue, violet and green, offset by warm red and yellow subtly draining toward the center of the composition.
Wandering around the gallery makes me feel like a child looking through windows in the rain. Nasso explains her work as reflections on the darkness of her childhood, where out in the Australian wilderness the lack of streetlights made the night into oscillating, pixilated shapes. For me, they are more like a state of deep meditation; the way the world looks when eyes are half open and the mind doesn’t bother to make sense out of the visual world. It is an area in space and time that where thoughts are still and meaning is not yet a tangible thing, only a feeling. It’s the reason Nasso’s paintings are so likable; they connect to the place that exists between consciousness and dreaming, between moment and memory. Their elusive quality is what makes them most appealing.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder?
This Place Called Home
Matt Wilson
February 12 – March 14, 2009
I feel a little guilty for liking Matt Wilson’s photographs so much, mainly because I like them without hesitation. You see, I’ve been trained by the church of the twentieth century (and what little there has been of the twenty first) only to like art that has put me through the stages of art grief: disorientation, rejection, self doubt, re-evaluation and then finally, acceptance/like. I am trained to ignore art that gives me an immediate, pure sense of satisfaction on the grounds that anything that hasn’t been wrestled with cannot be trusted to mean something real. That very well may be true, but it also assumes that there are rules for what makes good art.
The next battle to be overcome in this epic of my star-crossed art love, is photography. This medium seems unsettled in the art world; no one is sure what it is supposed to do, or how it should be handled. I don’t trust Matt Wilson’s farmhouse sitting on a grassy windswept hill in the warm twilight of a summer evening-I know it’s my nostalgia he has captured—but the fact that it's a photograph makes me want to believe it anyway. The images are small, and looking at them feels a little like peeking curiously through glowing keyholes: these images are innocent, there is nothing about the hardness of living in them. Cars veer around midnight corners in a blur of happy adrenaline, children pull brightly colored shirts over their faces to hide from things they don’t like and laugh while the world spins behind them, youth stands in the warm light of a sweaty street corner, and the texture of the rooftops is reflected in the texture of the street. I want to live in Wilson’s mediated reality, where he uses photography to pretend things could feel this perfect in life.
Show me this again in two months and my cynicism may seep back in and remind me to disregard Matt Wilson and call him sappy or pointless. But like anyone who has just fallen in love at first sight, it feels too good to be talked out if it.
Matt Wilson
February 12 – March 14, 2009
I feel a little guilty for liking Matt Wilson’s photographs so much, mainly because I like them without hesitation. You see, I’ve been trained by the church of the twentieth century (and what little there has been of the twenty first) only to like art that has put me through the stages of art grief: disorientation, rejection, self doubt, re-evaluation and then finally, acceptance/like. I am trained to ignore art that gives me an immediate, pure sense of satisfaction on the grounds that anything that hasn’t been wrestled with cannot be trusted to mean something real. That very well may be true, but it also assumes that there are rules for what makes good art.
The next battle to be overcome in this epic of my star-crossed art love, is photography. This medium seems unsettled in the art world; no one is sure what it is supposed to do, or how it should be handled. I don’t trust Matt Wilson’s farmhouse sitting on a grassy windswept hill in the warm twilight of a summer evening-I know it’s my nostalgia he has captured—but the fact that it's a photograph makes me want to believe it anyway. The images are small, and looking at them feels a little like peeking curiously through glowing keyholes: these images are innocent, there is nothing about the hardness of living in them. Cars veer around midnight corners in a blur of happy adrenaline, children pull brightly colored shirts over their faces to hide from things they don’t like and laugh while the world spins behind them, youth stands in the warm light of a sweaty street corner, and the texture of the rooftops is reflected in the texture of the street. I want to live in Wilson’s mediated reality, where he uses photography to pretend things could feel this perfect in life.
Show me this again in two months and my cynicism may seep back in and remind me to disregard Matt Wilson and call him sappy or pointless. But like anyone who has just fallen in love at first sight, it feels too good to be talked out if it.
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