DUMBO and Barbara Probst

So... It has been weeks (OK, honesty is the best policy... months) since I updated, and I have a good excuse other than general winter-inspired lethargy. My 11-year-old supercat Bubba was diagnosed with a huge tumor and I've been chilling with him at home instead of pounding the pavement in search of great new work in NYC lately. Perhaps this may sound a little pathetic and crazy-cat-ladyish, but if you knew this cat, you'd feel the same way.

This past Saturday I escaped my apartment and made my way down to Powerhouse Books & Exhibit Space to check out the current show, 2191 Days and Counting, a benefit for Iraq Veterans Against War. It's a mixed medium show, with some fantastic works by brilliant established pros like Steve McCurry. Anti-war as a theme in photography has been big for me this year if you may recall how much I loved Jim Lomasson's portraits of vets in the Pacific Northwest over the winter. Nina Berman contributes two striking portraits that emphasize her subjects' scars.

The most riveting photos, in my opinion, are by Farah Nosh, a female photojournalist who has been covering Iraq for years. Her two portraits are of amputees in Iraq posing for the camera with their children, who seem bemused with their father's conditions but strikingly comfortable with how much the lost limb or prosthetic has become a part of their family's daily life. In fact, if anyone especially loves me right now I'd like a print of Wounded Iraq I from the show catalog (c'mon, guys, it's for a great cause!). If I hadn't already wasted my tax refund on trivial things like bills I'd already be that print's owner.

More info about the show and about the 2,191 Days and Counting anti-war project can be found at the benefit's official site.


Then, since I was in DUMBO, I rounded the corner to check out the Visual Morphology show at Klompching. This is one gallery space in Brooklyn that always pushes the envelope, and this show is a great example. I really like the works in this show by Odette England (Attentional Landscapes No. 7 shown). A quick visit to her personal photography site reveals a project called Crash Markers that's both visually beautiful and thought-provoking, kind of of a photographic watercolor version of New York City's ghost bike program to mark the corners in the city where bicyclists have been killed.

While at the 111 Front Street Building I checked out the Eddie Adams show at Umbrage Gallery. Adams' work is so well-known and profound that I'm not even including a thumbnail because if you've never seen his Pulitzer-prize winning 1968 photo of the police chief of Saigon executing a Viet Cong prisoner, you better start googling straight away. Brilliant work - this particular photo probably inspired at least one hundred thousand antiwar activists, and the collection of photos in this show suggests that Adams was both supportive of the marines and soldiers he photographed in Vietnam, and a dedicated reporter of the inhuman violence that he witnessed while overseas.

Also at the 111 on display right now is the A.I.R. Artist In Residency show. A.I.R., which exclusively shows works by women artists, has a few photographers' work showint at the moment but the shot that really grabbed my attention was by Anat Zalk.

Anat Zalk at A.I.R. >>
The colors are muted, the story suggested or captured a mystery. Why a shattered coffee table? Why the trees just past the window? It's a shot that is both curious and absolutely deliberate and precise in every way. I'd love to see more of this photographer's work.

And to wrap up my very ambitious day of gallery watching, I headed into the city to check out the Barbara Probst show at Murray Guy. First of, I'll admit that I'd never before been to this gallery space and it's both unique and has a very cool layout for showing work. One of the two exhibit rooms is sleek and modern and the other has an unfinished wood floor and is very quiet.
I read up on Barbara Probst and knew in advance that the work in this show is inspired by surveillance, or in the art of capturing a moment in a scene from several angles. Sometimes cameras and tripods make cameos in the resulting stills. This technique aside, the resulting prints are somewhat striking just from their visual presentation. Probst blows out her color, resulting in blotchy prints that almost look like tabloid enlargements and border on Lichtenstein art. There is something undeniably masculine about the framing of some of the shots and this blunt use of color. I find the black and white shots included in the show to be very disconnected from the color work, but I suppose that's the point of presenting a scene with multiple angles shot all at the same second via radio control. The Barbara Probst show will be up until April 4, 2009.