Byline: Christopher Michno

Cécile B. Evans’ stand alone installation, “Something Tactical is Coming,” generates a deliciously satisfying SciFi dystopian theatricality. The bulk of the installation at Chateau Shatto is comprised of a production set from the second episode of her three-part video series “Amos’ World.” Effectively divided into two spaces, the installation delivers the fictitious architectural office interior of Amos, the character for whom the series is named. On the obverse side of the structure, a frame of wood studs and unfinished hardboard, the episode is story-boarded with a loosely schematic narrative scrawled in Sharpie and a lattice of small video screens (without audio) broadcasting rushes; that is, extra scene footage not used in the final cut.

Evans’ projects typically explore the darker side of human systems and infrastructure, in which she extrapolates ideas to their logical ends—with a healthy dose of ironic wit. Here, and in “Amos’ World,” she takes on the Utopian aspirations of Modernist architecture. Amos could be modeled after any number of Modern architects articulating a grand vision for idealized urban life. The most prominent example would be Le Corbusier, the designer behind the L’unite D’habitation in Marseille—a building of modular housing units adhering to Le Corbusier’s notions of aesthetics, communal living and harmonious existence with nature.

Even without the complete video of episode 2, the installation, its title derived from a foreboding line in the story, takes on an absorbingly world-building aspect, echoing SciFi literature and film, and conversely, failed idealism. The loosely sketched narrative with its B-movie campiness and darkly Orwellian overtones offers the satisfaction of fright-film goose bumps and the familiar ring of a ghost story.

Affixed to the gallery walls, two illustrations of human figures, which look as if they have been taken from an architectural standards book from the 1950s, indicate guidelines for designing to human scale. These drawings are attached to empty server housings—the computer infrastructure that digitizes, stores and serves up the virtual analog of human thoughts, memories and experience.

The artist asserts that the systems humans develop tend to shape humanity in turn, a theme that can also be evidenced in the installation’s video fragments, the rushes from “Amos’ World,” where puppeteers dressed in Chroma key blue manipulate Amos—Evans’ archetypal designer, personified as a puppet

The argument could be made that the reconstructed set from “Amos’ World” demystifies the video and dilutes its world-building, turning the project into an engineering problem and making precious the artifacts of the art-making process, to the detriment of the art itself. There is some merit to this view, yet Evans doesn’t appear to be interested in world-building so much as unraveling the logic of world-building—whether applied to a model of Utopian architectural as seen here, or as in many of her other projects, which comment on the alienating effects of technology. Her work is trenchant commentary, albeit with lots of cheek.

The art collective En Plein Error, comprised of artists Jenny Gagalka, Beaux Mendes and William Wasserman, practices a kind of extemporaneous riffing to create their pastel on paper works, in a process that might be loosely compared to a session of exquisite corpse, except the trio makes their marks contemporaneously, with an orchestration and awareness of each other’s engagement with the paper/medium. The drawings in this exhibition take their cues from art historical works, signaling that there is more going on here than improvisation, and one can make inferences from the diverse influences, and at the same time deduce intention. The Opening (all works 2018), evokes Renior’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81), but tosses in a dose of German expressionism, with faces that range in color from a vaguely corpselike yellowish-green worthy of George Grosz, to a boldly lavender/crimson/orange reminiscent of Emil Nolde or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

The three artists arrange short residencies/retreats that are the working studio sessions in which the collective generates their drawings. These must be as intensive as one imagines they are giddy. Holed up in a hotel room for a 36-hour stint, the immersive nature of the experience geared toward breaking down individual preferences and finding a collective voice, yields results that on one hand are vital—witness the wisp of a stray asparagus spear on the hors d’oeuvres table—and on the other, carry a provisional, almost preparatory quality.

The ambitious Noah’s Ark conveys both the compositional strategies and the immediacy of their process, depicting a Boschian procession that winds from foreground through the middle and into the deep vista of the picture, where a skeletal ark is sketched in a luminescent circle that somehow escapes the gloom of darkly foreboding storm clouds. Figures are both unfinished and obscured creating tension between pictorial voids and a palimpsest-like sequence of rewriting.

Paired with En Plein Error’s unvarnished expressionism merged with a certain conceptual structural conceit, is Brian Kennon’s “Pages (Bonin, Buren, Benedict),” a collection of nine modest collages, in which he juxtaposes side by side images taken from art books. The sobriety with which Kennon goes about his work, and the material simplicity and restraint of the objects, plays in stark contrast to En Plein Error. Kennon’s work is generated through his research and mining of libraries, or the art historical archive. Each work in the exhibition is some combination of images of the work of artists Daniel Buren, Cosima von Bonin or Will Benedict. Much like an art history slide lecture, images are presented for examination and comparison. But their removal from the book and the library shifts the frame of reference. These concurrent exhibits reflect different modes of interacting with art historical knowledge, but in both Kennon’s work, and that of En Plein Error, ideas of authorship are reexamined and art historical references are detached from their original fields, allowing something new to emerge.

“Fructis,” Michael Williams’ first exhibition with David Kordansky Gallery, presents the painter’s familiar wisecracking take on the ephemera of the everyday, as seen in his inkjet paintings, and his formally ambitious “Puzzle” paintings, which take a serious stab at circumventing the figuration/abstraction divide. It could be seen as a bifurcated practice—yet this is a paradoxical assertion; each of these veins informs the other. Like previous iterations, Williams’ seven inkjet paintings are developed with digital drawing tools—here, they are a combination of Photoshop and a drawing pad. Despite the high-tech, they retain a primitive quality, like a crisply designed but intentionally awkward zine, printed on art paper, married to Williams’ cartoony style of drawing. More importantly, they blur the distinction between the digital and gestural.

Williams’ inkjet paintings feel deliciously off-kilter, and the irreverence hits at varying levels, generating layers of ambiguity. Take, for example, JC (all inkjet paintings 2018)—a Christ crucified on a 45 mph road sign—and Descendant Egg, an egg fried sunny side up, band-aid stretched across the yolk as it appears to be slipping through cracks in lavender-colored flooring. With Middle Game 1 Williams uses a modified aspect-ratio photographic image of a bed. The lavender tones of its quilted headboard find echoes in the skin tones of the crudely drawn towel-draped figure that lies prone on the bed—and whose back morphs into an analog telephone. Mike, spatially organized around overlapping geometric fields (the subtle modulations of color between intersecting planes evoking Albers, but updated), is reminiscent of a joke where you meet yourself coming and going—only, Mike (a self-portrait?) is pissing into his own back pocket.

His oil-on-canvas “Puzzle” paintings—a series of disfigurements, if you will—flatten illusionistic space in favor of organic interlocking shapes and an inventive interplay of color and texture. The show’s title can be taken to mean enjoyment (as in the pleasures of painting, perhaps) or some variant of its Latin root; or possibly contemporary slang for “when things go horribly wrong”—a meaning consistent with the exhibition’s epigraph by Anders Sandberg, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

Sandberg’s quote brackets Williams’ work with a coolly analytical assessment of humanity’s transience over the long haul, in a universe that will ultimately wind down. He posits that the viability of the species can be extended by living as software—a not entirely comforting prospect. It forces recognition of the ways we live symbiotically with software—an evolution readily reflected in Williams’ painting practice.

Positioned adjunctly, an array of 10 enamel-on-linen paintings (10 HBOS, 2018), delivered à la Pollock, mimes HBO’s logo/branding. The predominately grisaille works, formally less convincing than their fellows, are presented as an animated sequence depicting the lead-in to the cable channel’s programming. They might be read as a clever joke on painting’s allure in the golden age of television, or better yet, the concept of seeing patterns in abstraction (pareidolia), which in turn comments on the artist’s puzzle paintings.

With relations between Russia and Western liberal democracies strained to the point of rupture, the rise of nationalistic fervor and anti-democratic forces on all sides, and notions of dissent and finding a viable way forward taking on greater urgency with each successive day, “Sredstvo Kool (Medium Cool): Contemporary Video Work from Russia” at Young Projects comes at a crucial moment. The exhibition features video work by nine different artists and collectives, showcasing a chorus of dissenting voices within Russian culture that are critical not only of the surge of Russian nationalism but also, appropriately, of Capitalism’s failures.

Two videos by Chto Delat, a collective of philosophers and poets, stand out for their direct challenge to the tyranny of authoritarianism through devices derived from Brechtian theater. The single channel HD video Palace Square 100 years after. A Film—Lecture: “4 Seasons of Zombie” (2017) is an amusing reflection on the October Revolution on its 100th anniversary and of a capitalist ideology that makes zombies out of people.

Collective member and philosophy professor Oxana Timofeeva directly addresses the camera in a roving lecture delivered at the Palace Square in front of the Winter Palace (The Hermitage, St. Petersburg). The lecture is infused with a sense of historical irony as she stops briefly to get a photo with actors dressed as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great who are posing for photos with tourists. There are moments of brilliance when Timofeeva discusses the link between the Christian “hope of the resurrection” and the appeal of zombies in popular culture. She is accompanied by the collective’s ensemble zombie performance. Left unanswered are critical questions: what next in the struggle for justice?

The other Chto Delat work, The Excluded. In a Moment of Danger (2014) is a much starker affair with a four channel flat screen presentation that primarily takes the form of actors addressing the camera to discuss sensitive issues in Russia that have led to personal and collective tragedy: anti-gay legislation, the shooting of protestors in Ukraine, etc. As the conversation continues, the video moves into a wider public space with implications for society at large.

Sasha Pirogova’s single channel video Motherland (2016) addresses heroic ideals embodied in the Mutter Heimat statue in Berlin’s Treptower Park, which commemorates Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin. Pirogova futilely emulates the ossified posture of these ideals, his body betraying the struggle of holding the pose.

Other highlights include a massive 3 channel video installation, The Last Riot (2005–07) by AES +F. Part of their Liminal Space Trilogy, it resembles a post-apocalyptic video game with scenes of digitized, animated beautiful young models wielding implements of war, engaged in an Olympian struggle. It is full of art historical references and set to Wagner’s Die Valküre, but it’s an anodyne version of the apocalypse. Vika Begalska’s Army Boots Crave Tenderness (2015) is much more interesting—a recording of a performance by the Teresa troupe at the Luda Gallery in St. Petersburg, it’s a kind of sex farce of the “make love not war” variety, with rousing cheers to Aphrodite.

The intimate scale of John O’Reilly’s photomontages belies the broadly ranging ambition and scope of his concerns. The 40-year survey of his work at Zevitas Marcus reveals a consistency of approach spanning the entirety of O’Reilly’s production. The artist, whose work was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial, began making paper montages in the 1960s, almost entirely with a Polaroid 100 camera acquired in the mid-’80s. His meticulously constructed compositions seamlessly draw together disparate images from varied sources—art historical, printed material, pornography and studio Polaroids—into a nearly continuous pictorial space.

O’Reilly’s antecedents are John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch and other Dada artists—a number of whom claim to have invented photomontage; but his interest in the form is not in emulating the expressly political aims of Heartfield’s early works. Hausmann and Hoch are more closely related in that theirs were open forms, allowing for associative possibilities.

The juxtaposition of images that are clearly discontinuous is smoothed over by O’Reilly’s technical dexterity and intricate process (elaborated in detail in Francine Koslow Miller’s essay, Assemblies of Magic) to create works that initiate a dialogue between literary, art historical and more introspectively personal concerns.

Heartfield’s works contributed to an understanding of photographic media as manipulable, and within that framework, O’Reilly’s montages are examples of the pre-digital plasticity of the medium. Yet O’Reilly delivers his finely conjured fictions with a wink, alternately concealing and exposing the evidence of his interventions.

His process of shooting and re-shooting studio tableau, and then cutting, gluing, sanding and smoothing edges introduces traces of the artist with painters, writers and other figures. A reproduction of Velasquez’ Las Meninas (A Paper Self, 1986) alongside a cutout of his own profile—literally, a trace—puts him in the company of another artist who put himself reflexively within the frame while commenting on the world around him.

Within the montages, he leaves evidence of the construction of his tableau—a Board propping up a picture (Of Cavafy—Swimmers, 2008), or a pair of thumb tacks (Worcester Street Series #2 County Road, 1992), and so on; in addition to the conversation being inflected with the artist’s body, his presence directly or indirectly felt, the works reference the artist’s hand, commenting on their own facture.

This leads to a push/pull between a purely interior and imaginary space created within his concoctions and an indexical relationship to the process, the studio and the self.

Of these interior spaces, none is more illusionistic than Talking with Whitman (1984), a fictitious portrait of the artist, seated nude on an ottoman, his back to the camera, in conversation with Walt Whitman, evoking the poet’s Song of Myself (1855). Nor is there any that exceed the technical sleight of hand he achieves in this piece, in which he seamlessly blends the space between himself and Whitman, as if traversing time and space, establishing a kinship.

The works here, a mere introduction to O’Reilly’s output, offer a window into the artist’s long conversation with art history and his endlessly engaging interior space.

Twenty-one years ago, Katherine Sherwood suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her without the use of her right hand. As described in a 2012 article she wrote for the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, when she eventually returned to her studio, her practice shifted dramatically. Out of necessity, she learned to paint with her left hand. She also reported feeling less self-conscious and able to make more “urgent” connections; whether these changes resulted directly from the stroke (as posited by neuroscientists), the work that followed this life-altering event was infused with heightened lyricism, sensitivity and color.

Sherwood’s solo exhibition at Walter Maciel, “The Interior of the Yelling Clinic,” features works from her recent “Venuses” and “Brain Flowers” painting series, as well as an installation of 10 mixed-media figurative works from her 2010–12 series, “Healers.” Images of the brain appear throughout, and while the artist had been using brain imagery in the early 1990s before her stroke, here, they refer back to Sherwood.

The 10 mixed-media figures in “Healers”—constructed from abstract painting, clothing fabricated specifically for this series, painted neurological images based on the artist’s brain scans, and digital prints—function as portraits of a sort. They purvey an open narrative structure counterpoised with a tactile materiality. Sherwood’s handling of paint in these works is wonderfully fluid and sensuous. Shifts in texture from printed, painted and sartorial elements are reflected in the construction of each work. For example, a smooth, yet crack-suffused meniscus-like paint-pour overlaps the embroidered seal adorning the raw linen canvas in Angelo (2012). In Stevie (2011), quilted pants hang beneath the torso and face of an inquisitive-looking young man who wears a kind of top hat filled with what appear to be radiographic images of blood vessels.

In her “Venus” series, Sherwood complicates the treatment of the female figure in Western art, composing reclining nudes after iconic ones by Manet, Ingres, Giorgione and Goya; but Sherwood’s are painted as a critique of the sexualized ideal—the faces of her Venuses comprise her own brain scans and each is depicted with a physical disability that references her own experience of post-stroke paralysis. Olympia (2014) wears a leg brace, After Ingres (2014) a prosthetic arm. Blind Venus (for G) (2018) has a red-and-white cane, Maya (2014) a walking cane. Each of the paintings is made on the backs of several smaller canvases that are stitched together to form a larger whole. On the reverse side are art historical reproductions, once used as lecture illustrations, with unpainted areas of the Venuses still retaining reference numbers linked to master painting images.

In her mining of art historical references, and merging them with allusions to her own medical history, Sherwood asserts a critique of idealized beauty as propagated and reinforced by master paintings created by and for men. Instead, she posits new images of supremely confident women with the composure and power of Olympia, who have moved beyond the confinement of “the ideal.”

Both love letter and indictment, “The Modernist,” Catherine Opie’s new photographic installation and short film, blurrily overlays real places and occurrences with imagined events, creating an alternate near-term history of Los Angeles. Known as a portraitist and documenter of strictly factual people and communities, with this project the artist has ventured into the construction of a fiction that is loosely a portrait of the city she calls home. “The Modernist” is also broadly informed by the international and domestic political landscape, fueling a mounting sense of outrage.

As an homage to Chris Marker’s 1962 post-apocalyptic short film La Jetée, Opie’s film is neither as inventive nor as convincing as Marker’s psychologically harrowing tale of time travel and the sacrifice of the individual for the collective.

Yet “The Modernist” strikes home on its own terms. Opie knows how to set a scene well, engaging with the interplay between iconic images and the underlying nuances that either belie or give rise to mythologies—a continuing motif in Opie’s work that handily lends itself to spinning a tale. The films share an ambience of dread, and although The Modernist reflects the economic and political malaise of our own era, La Jetée’s Cold War nuclear terror—tempered with pallid resignation—carries an existential threat that is hard to trump (conflation intended). But perhaps that is the point: The assault on social, economic and political institutions is just as dire. (Still, North Korea looms.)

Stosh Fila, aka, Pig Pen, photographed by Opie in numerous series, inhabits the role of aspiring artist-turned-arsonist. A pristine copy of the coffee-table tome Case Study Homes sits on the protagonist’s coffee table. Using it as a kind of playbook, Pig Pen’s artist plots a campaign of destruction against the houses featured within its pages. These homes, once conceptualized as templates for affordable housing while embodying sleek Modernist design, are now emblems of luxury and privilege. Not many more than those that still exist today were built.

The arsonist’s own stunted economic mobility is spurred by a keen awareness of class stratification, signaled in Opie’s film by newspaper headlines declaring the plight of families of modest means burned out of their homes by runaway wildfires. We are meant to conclude that they are unlikely to have the resources to rebuild. Out of a sense of egalitarianism or class retribution, the artist emerges here as serial arsonist. Like so many cinematic killers, he creates an ever expanding collage of targets and trophies—presented in the gallery as an artifact of the film’s facture in the form of a collage authored by Pig Pen.

1Opie’s world-building is complete to the minutest detail. Headlines referencing real-life art stars and catastrophic losses of the architectural gems that made Los Angeles’ reputation as a locus for innovative design create a queasy sense of unreality—Opie’s film, and Marker’s too, introduces a hallucinatory motif. It’s difficult to tell which headlines are factual, and which, for the purposes of the project, are fabricated. One could be forgiven for frantically checking to see that any number of the homes seen on the arsonist’s trophy wall are still standing. Pig Pen’s collage embellishes images of Eames and Koenig homes with painted flames. John Lautner’s Chemosphere and Sheats-Goldstein Residence feature prominently as arson casualties and are photographed in situ. (Lautner hated Los Angeles, but it was his laboratory. He was remarkably responsive to client needs and budgets, and profoundly sensitive to site and the integration between structure and environment, as seen in the realization of the Sheats-Goldstein Residence’s indoor/outdoor aesthetic.)

The theater for Opie’s film, an elegant rectangular prism with rounded corners and reflective sheathing installed in the center of the gallery, was designed by architect Michael Maltzan, who also designed Regen Projects. It is a modernist temple meant to evoke facets of the structures seen in Opie’s photographs and film. The exterior skin distortedly reflects Opie’s photographs that hang in the gallery. In the far gallery, a vitrine displaying a luxe collector’s box with the film DVD
and a box of Swan Vestas (the brand of English matches so prominently featured in the hands of Pig Pen’s pyromaniac), compacts the experience into a market gesture.

“The Modernist” cumulatively adds up to a complex set of “truths” not unlike the way Opie’s portraits of real people and communities offer nuanced ways of perceiving their subjects, commenting on both the exigencies of art making and the failures of modern architecture’s utopian dreams. The failure of those dreams provides the undertow in Opie’s work.

Care for a pickled egg? How about a mayonnaise sandwich? Or maybe you’d prefer apple butter? With these questions and a simple spread of food with which to ply visitors, Michael Lewis Miller gently draws his audiences into his performances, which arise almost surreptitiously out of the artist’s self-effacing nonchalance and Appalachian-bred hominess and hospitality—the fact is, the performance is ongoing from the moment Miller steps into the space and begins unpacking his provisions. Broadly addressing the notion of personal identity and of the individual within a community, Miller turns his art simultaneously inward and outward, coupling personal archaeology with an exploration of familial relationships; at the same time, he invites his audience to join him in these endeavors and implicates them in the family dynamics that eventually reveal themselves.

“Michael Lewis Miller: 1989 to Present, Survey Exhibition” gathers 28 years of the artist’s sculpture, hand-stitched costumes and cabinets filled with sets of nested drawers and collections of objects, all inextricably entwined with and activated through performance. The breaking of bread and Miller’s amiable disposition and unaffected directness surmount the barrier between artist and audience, performance and life. Miller’s meandering style of narrative, which has the informality of an afternoon visit for a chat and cup of coffee with a friend, disguises the performance so that the realization of its scope dawns with revelatory power. Shifting to more formal gestures, Miller’s interactions with his audience become more theatrical and performative as he interacts with the sculptures.

Visually, his hand-crafted cabinets bear some resemblance to H. C. Westermann, and his work is likewise autobiographical. He also calls to mind Michael McMillen’s evocative sprawling collections—though Miller is pristine by comparison. But Miller’s objects are really a stage for performance and facilitate an ongoing interplay with his audience. His work reflects complementary theatricality and vulnerability, while generating a lasting hook—an unexpected draw into the emotional entanglement of family dysfunction.

Sowing (all works, 1989—present) paired with Sweep offers an example of this unfolding dynamic. Donning tartan, apron, bonnet and seed spreader, (and asking an audience member to tie the apron strings at his back), Miller sings an Appalachian plaint as he sows wheat berries around the gallery with the spreader. Removing the costume, he then begins taking brooms from a cart (Sweep) and walking up to spectators. “Will you help me sweep?” he asks. “After all, I fed you.”

And here, the cumulative weight of Miller’s performance begins to dawn. Although all unhappy families may be unhappy in their own way, at the very least, their unhappiness stirs a glimmer of recognition. Miller’s work, however, does not contain recriminatory bitterness; instead it gently—and generously—acknowledges fragility and imperfections, including his own.

In Mary’s Prosthesis, he struggles into a “straight jacket” attached to a cabinet with small casters. Thus harnessing himself, he drags the burden of his own—and his mother’s—baggage around the gallery: the effort, arduous, the cabinet lurching. And, then, he coaxes someone else into the jacket to do the same.

“Revolution and Ritual,” while very narrowly focused on three Mexican women photographers, seeks to address in broad strokes changes in ideas about Mexican identity through the work of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide and Tatiana Parcero, whose careers together span more than a century.

Castrejón, a studio photographer-turned-war documentarian, began photographing the various revolutionary factions as they traveled through her home town of Teloloapan in the state of Guerrero during the Mexican revolution. Her photographs, all postcard-sized—a facet of the economics of the studio photography of that era—are displayed within a quadrangle of walls and vitrines in the center of the gallery, as if in a time capsule. The works are interesting for what they convey about social strata; for example, her portraits of soldiers from indigenous areas who have been pressed into service by one faction or another, or that of Colonel Amparo Salgado (Sin título, 1911), a woman who led soldiers into battle. While many of Castrejón’s subjects adopt stilted poses, Salgado stands with a remarkable grace and self-assurance, her matter-of-fact gaze conveying a kind of unaffected, seen-it-all confidence. A few photographs hint at the violence that tore through the country: troops in front of a building pockmarked with bullet holes (Sin título,1912), an execution (Sin título,1913), and three very young revolutionaries awaiting the firing squad (Sin título,1913).

Iturbide’s photographs are a real visual feast and the most immediately engaging of the exhibit. Encouraged by her mentor Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the preeminent Mexican modernist photographer, Iturbide used photography as a means to explore her country. Her depictions of indigenous communities and rituals that held both pre- and post-Conquest significance convey a sensitivity and sophistication that permeates her work. Virgen de Guadalupe, Chalma, México (2007) depicts a large radiant mandorla from which the likeness of the Virgin is missing. The absent body evokes both a pre-Columbian past, in which the Nahua fertility goddess was enshrined, and the Spanish colonial substitution of the Christian symbol. Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México (1979) also confuses epochs with a Seris Indian woman dressed as if from a different century, holding a 1970s boom-box at her side.

The mixed-photographic media works of Tatiana Parcero employ images from pre-Columbian and European maps and codices, biological drawings, and even diagrams from esoteric or mystical systems paired with truncated photos of Parcero’s own body printed on transparent acetate as a means to address the violence of conquest, and the many disappeared bodies both in her country of origin, Mexico, and Argentina, where she now lives. Her “Cartografía Interior” series, full of biological drawings, suggests lost bodies of knowledge and an unknowable interior; the “Nuevo Mundo” series, featuring various world maps overlaid with images of her pregnant body reiterates the magnitude of European conquest and concerns of lost identities. The recurrence of violence through various social and political upheavals, the suppression of cultural identity, and the colonization and disappearances of bodies is a theme that runs throughout Parcero’s work and unifies the exhibition as a whole.

Culled from five different series of Naida Osline’s photographic work since 2007, “Florescence” examines an arc of her practice that is focused on taxonomies of flora and fauna. The exhibition title, drawn from her photographic series of the same name, can be taken to refer to the metaphoric blooming of the various real and chimerical botanical specimens that are the subjects of her semi-documentary process—semi in the sense that, even when she is not devising some strange new hybrid species for her botanical portraits, she is never merely documenting.

Her work references the early wunderkammers of Europe, with their collections of flora and fauna, and botanical illustrations; by extension, she alludes to museological practices, and directly, by way of her subjects, to the European age of exploration, Europe’s colonial expansion, and the wunderkammer as an expression of imperial acquisition.

In her 2010 “Tattooed Tobacco” series, which traces the history of tobacco and its commerce between the Americas and Europe, Osline frames the plant’s drying leaves as substance analogous to human lungs or skin—organs both affected by the plant’s use. Pairs of leaves resemble lungs, the veins looking like bronchioles branching into each lobe. The “skin” of each tobacco leaf is literally tattooed, though with temporary ink, thus illustrating social, political and ritual associations with tobacco. Tattooed Tobacco No. 3 reveals an illustration of Columbus, and a depiction of one of his ships; No. 4 references the slave trade; the series becoming a kind of conceptual map to tobacco’s history and uses.

Dreamt up by Osline as recombination of botanical specimens and animal or insect parts—or even manufactured objects, the images of fauna in her 2007 “Florescence” series suggest transmutation of plant, animal, human and synthetic into something novel and sentient. Her visual inventiveness brings to mind the works of Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the noted court painter to the Hapsburgs whose portraits imagined people as a sum of flora and fauna. In Florescence No. 2, multiple hair-covered eyeballs spill from the mouth of a Bird of Paradise flower; teeth and palette are exposed in No. 9. These chimera offer radical possibilities, or a kind of queering of categories, and are reminiscent of her “Deeper Skin” series (not exhibited here), in which closeup photographs of human subjects reveal strange appendages.

In the “Visionary Plants” and “Poppyhead” series, Osline creates an iconography of plants used for ritual or altered consciousness. Each plant is depicted in larger-than-life scale. Sacred Datura (2010) alludes to the ubiquity of Jimsonweed, the hallucinogen used to achieve visions. In Sex of Drugs (2009), male and female cannabis plants stand side by side. In the “Poppyhead” series, the bulbous pods stand against a foreboding sky.

The categorizing and identifying that Osline does ultimately turn into interpreting and inventing, as she revisits the notion of an archive; as she probes and offers speculative possibilities, she suggests a critique of history and presents new ways of seeing the world and moving into the future.