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INTIMATE ARCHAEOLOGY — Elaine Duigenan, July 9 — August 29 THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY, July 9, 2008 The gossamer quality of nylon stockings and hairnets is at the core of Elaine Duigenan's fascinating photograms. Colin Pantell talks to her about her work, and how she was discovered by a New York gallery at Rhubarb-Rhubarb. "I started doing photograms through pure experimentation," says Elaine Duigenan. "The first thing I scanned was an old hairnet and it felt like I had discovered something new and exciting, something that lent itself well to the work that I was doing." These early experiments by the London-based photographer led to more detailed photograms of archaic women's wear, work that will be on show in Duigenan's Intimate Archaeology exhibition running at Klompching Gallery in New York from 10 July until 29 August. "After I scanned the hairnet, I did the Nylons series," says Duigenan. "I began collecting them, starting with vintage stockings by Dior and going through to more contemporary versions. Collecting and discovering nylons in unlikely places was part of my passion for the process." "It's like finding by accident because nylons are objects of beauty and oddness. They are functional, but they are also flirty, sexy things, and they are fetish objects. I was interested in the delicacy of the stockings, the way you could see individual threads pulling away. The nylons are both there and not there, fragile items that are incredibly intricate and can unravel so easily, but with a texture that has an almost sculptural quality. They connect on many levels, so people react in different ways and bring their own connections to them." "After completing her Nylons series, Duigenan returned to photographing hairnets, partly because she also wanted to collect them. Drawn by the strangeness of the items, and the fact that some older hairnets are made from human hair, duigenan found her curiosity piqued. She also found that the organic nature of the hairnets revealed a darker, forensic side that found a resonance with some of her earlier work. This darkness carried over to Duigenan's hairnets, where the mystery was compounded by her arrangements of the nets on the scanner, arrangements that, given the hairnets' flexible nature, are only partial at best. Indeed Duigenan's hairnets almost take on a life of their own. They tend to spring back from their orderly arrangements and weave shapes that emerge from their organic architecture. Look at them long enough and they become a photographic Rorschach test — one image depicts a seahorse, another a pair of knickers or a jellyfish, or whatever the depths of the viewer's psyche decides it to be. The luxuriant quality of the prints, and finding opportunities to show them to gallerists and publishers, has played a large part in Duigenan's burgeoning career. For her, the most effective places to show work and network are review events, especially Rhubarb-Rhubarb, where she met both Debra Klomp Ching and Darren Ching (owners of the Klompching Gallery). " ... I had a three-line email from Debra last year asking if I would like representation, and I said yes, and now I have my first New York show, something I am obviously delighted about." |
FALLEN PARADISE — William Greiner, May 1 — June 27 THE NEW YORK SUN, May 15, 2008 The Klompching Gallery, Suite 206, has only been open for six months. Its present exhibition is “William Greiner: Fallen Paradise,” color photographs of Louisiana where Mr. Greiner was born and still lives. “London Lodge, Metairie” (2005) is a picture of a closed gas station and a dilapidated motel; the bottom half of the frame is taken up with cracked asphalt and a stagnant puddle. Mr. Greiner seems to have absorbed influences of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, and found a style based on abstracted architectural components and oddments of color. |
SUSPENDED REALITIES — Sarah Lynch, March 6 — April 25 NEW YORK MAGAZINE (Art Candy), March 20, 2008 It's a cream cake dangling from a fishing rod — every dieter's nightmare! Actually, it's a photograph of a pile of papers, topped with a raspberry and suspended from a piece of wire. Sarah Lynch builds such sculptures and uses her camera to create such elegant illusions around simple, delectable objects like plums and bubbles and freshly fallen leaves. Her tricky photographs are hanging at Klompching Gallery until April 25. |
SNOWBOUND — Lisa M. Robinson, January 3 — February 29 THE NEW YORKER, January 21, 2008 For the past five winters, Robinson photographed landscapes from Colorado to New York so enveloped in snow that they appear almost blank. Her pictures zero in on what remains when the world turns white: a lakeside picnic table in its own snug furrow; a plot, outlined by black poles and yellow rope, crisscrossed by the tracks of solitary travellers. The patched-together wooden shack of an ice fisherman is fragile and forlorn in one image, but, seen from a distance alongside a scattering of similar shelters, it becomes part of a colorful toy village of Monopoly houses seen through a scrim of falling snow.
THE ARCHITECT'S NEWSPAPER, January 23, 2008 For those who may be lamenting the dearth of snow in New York this winter, there is now plenty of it in Brooklyn. Over the course of five winters, Lisa M. Robinson, a youg New York-based photographer, set out to visit sites across the United States to capture images of snowfall. After taking on a larger project to photograph water, she became mesmerized by its manifestation as snow. Her views of these various states of winter landscapes are now on display at Klompching Gallery, a new gallery in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood devoted to emerging and overlooked talent. All of the images capture the paradox of nature's still beatury in what viewers can only imagine — and what the photographer must have experienced —to be varying degrees of inhospitble conditions. She captured each frame as she found it, without intervention or stylization. The trackless snow leaves no record of the photographer's presence. Some scenes she sought out, but most she stumbled upon. Wish, one of the most iconic images of the show, was entirely accidental. Setting out to photograph a frozen lake, she first sent marching across a meadow to get there, when, in the distance she noticed a speck of black along the way. As she got closer, it revealed itself as a park bench almost submerged under snow. The lake that she was originally intending to capture picks up a new presence and meaning in the photograph — as a thin green line in the distance, dividing earth and sky. And this is one of the work's main themes: the relationship between earth andky. Robinson manages to draw out some evocative horizons, accentuated by the gentle palette she uses. She divides many of the photographas, each 28-inch-by-36-inch digital C-types, into broad horizontal registers, with white on the bottom, and a dark, but soft, sea green sky on top. The lake in Wish and a grove of trees in Solstice providea band of darker color, clearly definingthe distinction between bottom and top. And in others, a torrent of snowfall blurs this line or sometimes makes it disappear entirely. by using snow as her subject, Robinson is able to immediately force the viewer to recognize issues of temporality. As dramatic and substnative and pure as these landscapes are, they will be quick to vanish. When someone or something leaves its tracks, the scene will be marred, and when spring comes, it will literally evaporate. In this world, architecture only underscores a sense of the transitory. In two photogrpahs, she captures fishing huts placed over holes in a frozen lake. There but for a moment; the ice on which they are built will disappear come spring. While the work is most definitively wintry, Robinson manages to gnerate a sense of paradox by leaving traces of other seasons in some of the frames. Snow stills summer's trampoline and basketball hoop and park bench. Frozen garden plants or the ropes of a golf course seem caught inn a silent death. Blades of fresh, green grass emerge from under the blanket of an early snowfall, creating a tension between seasons coming and going. Though not stated directly, what remains hauntingly implicit in the snow is an awareness of changing environmental conditions brought about by human intervention.
THE TIMES LEDGER, February 14, 2008 Lisa M. Robinson's photography collection "Snowbound," currently on exhibit at the Klompching Gallery in Dumbo, might sound like an unwelcome concept in the middle of winter, but in a way, that is one of the points of her work: drawing attention to the uneasy relationship between people and aloof, frozen environments. The exhibition consists of 16 of Robinson's photographs taken between 2003 and 2007, all depicting snowy, barren landscapes with faint evidence of human presence that works conversely to imply our non-presence in these inhospitable but beautiful landscapes. A Jackson Heights resident and native of Savannah, Ga., Robinson discovered her love for the photographic medium toward the end of a five-year stay in Argentina, when she realized that she didn't have any photographs of the country and spent the rest of her stay taking black-and-white photos. "I never imagined pursuing it professionally," she said. Later she would attend Savannah College of Arts and Sciences, where she honed her craft and received a Master of Fine Arts in photography in 1999. Since then, Robinson's work has appeared in galleries all over the world and she's received grants and other distinctions for her work. Her book, also called "Snowbound" and published by German art-book house Kehrer Verlag, came out in December. Robinson took her first snowy photograph in Pennsylvania in 2002 while on a road trip. The photograph, which she titled "Running Fence," depicts fence posts connected by plastic orange mesh, running through and semi-buried by snow that renders its function obsolete. There was something that struck her about the image that she couldn't pin down. "I wanted to keep making it to figure out what it was," she said. As she started creating sparser images, she said they also became more complex in their meaning. Her other photos, taken over a five-year period, include such objects as a bucket, phone booth, basketball hoop, trampoline and above-ground swimming pool covered in snow. Some of these aren't in the exhibit at the Klompching, but appear in her book. "I'm very conscious of titles," she said. "I want to open up the possibility of an image without shutting it down." Robinson said her titles are there to suggest a direction to the viewer. For example, one of the images, "Sonata," shows intertwining footprints and fence posts resembling written music. She also describes a distinctly American element present in her "Snowbound" collection. "There's something reminiscent of a specific experience to me, a suburban childhood," she said. But Robinson admits she's been surprised to learn how that American blush captured in her photographs - "the way we shape our concrete, how the pylons here are orange, but elsewhere they're blue É" - has still managed to resonate with Europeans and South Americans who have seen her work at exhibits abroad and commented on the familiarity of the images.
ARTCRITICAL.COM, February, 2008 Snow has a transformative quality. It revises one’s recognition of the mundane and everyday—behind snow’s pristine and uniform cloak, our perception of what once was easily identified changes. Consolidating and concealing, snow altars objects, suggesting essential shapes and forms. While Lisa Robinson’s exhibition “Snowbound” on view at Klompching Gallery expresses this idea in closely cropped, intimate photographs of snow-covered commonplace objects, her photographs also delve deeper into the ethos of an at once foreign and familiar polar environment. Robinson’s gaze isolates single objects against a stark, minimal snowscape. In her off-square format—all prints are 28 by 36 inches— horizons fall roughly halfway in her compositions, dividing the photograph into neatly symmetrical bands of ground and sky. Often in such photographs as Wish (2005) and Solstice (2007), these expanses of sky and ground read flatly as slabs of softened whites and almost achromatic blues, suggesting a flirtation with a geometric abstraction. Objects—benches, the suburban basketball goal, fishing shacks, trampolines—against these fantastic backdrops are removed from their banal context, appear magical in their remove and disturbing in their silent isolation. The photographs are at best when minimal and focused around a single object, composed as if a portrait. An exception is the image Invisible City (2007) (perhaps an allusion to the Italo Calvino novel thus named) where a village of ice fishing shacks populates the center of an otherwise blank space, enigmatically depicted at such a distance that the shacks appear as scaled architectural models. This photograph proves, like others, that when one forgets the name and loses immediate recognition of what one sees is when the narrative is strongest and most dislocated. Robinson’s efforts lose focus however when the photographs’ subjects appear set up rather than discovered, such as in Aria (2007) in which a positioned cauliflower sprouts up through a blanket of snow. Lisa Robinson’s photographs have a quiet, meditative charm. They ask the larger question of what does this environment mean in the 21st Century? Although Robinson’s snowscapes recall the nineteenth-century Arctic exploration that captured America’s imagination, her work also conjures our 21st-century fear of natural disaster—that nature will reclaim the manmade landscape by our own disregard for the environment. This has been the consequence shown in many recent blockbuster films such as the The Day After Tomorrow and I am Legend. Depicting the residue of human activity rather than people themselves, Robinson implicates our modern sense of loneliness, isolation and wanting evoked by this frigid environment. |
MOTHERLAND — Simon Roberts, October 23 — December 24 ART REVIEW, February, 2008 Perhaps my recent listen to NPR's Intelligence Squared debate 'Is Russia Becoming Our Enemy Again?' didn't prepare me well for Simon Roberts's photo-essayMotherland, at the recently opened DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Breidge Overpass, Brooklyn) gallery Klompching, as I found myself balking at the press release's suggestion that Roberts's series dispels 'the clichéd view of poverty-stricken post-communist Russia'. The photos deployed now-systematic tactics for capturing a region of the world — portraits of the local colour, from Cossack soldiers to wrestlers (photos which, in the best cases, suggested Rineke Dijkstra; in the worst, Wes Anderson). Roberts was wise to let his content do the talking, and more often than not, Russia's history loomed unsettlingly in the background like a naging reminder. The brightly coloured Chechnya market scene of Outdoor Market (2005), set against a row of decimated brick houses, may be the most heavy-handed evocation of this residue, but it is equally one of the most elegantly wrought. |