Tiptoeing Through the Cosmos: Recent Photography at Luhring Augustine

Installation view. 

By WM May 27, 2024

“What is art? Form becoming style; but the style is the man; therefore art is the humanizing of forms.”—Jean Luc Goddard, 1967

Luhring Augustine opened a unexpectedly strong group photo show on April 25 at their flagship Chelsea location, an exhibition that feels refreshingly light in comparison to the sometimes operatic heaviness of their gesamkunstwerk video installations.  The aesthetic, nevertheless, is a clear extension of the gallery’s consistent vision: a probing for moments in which the magic of the infinite bursts through the cracks of everyday life (see prior examples in the work of Guido Van Der Werve, Ragnar Kjartansson and Pipilotti Rist).  The present show takes its title takes from a famed Diane Arbus line about taking pictures and pilfering late night Oreos, which generalizes into a loose organizing principle for curators Sasha Helinski and Lauren Wittels to showcase a number of emerging photographers alongside more established peers.  

Sheida Soleimani, Correspondents, 2024.

The exhibition features a number of still life and domestic scenes with laden with art historical overtones, a common enough genre but largely well executed in the present show.  Shaun Pierson is representative of this lane: table-top arrangements that resemble new wave Dutch stilleven, reversed portrait sessions where he is photographed being photographed by his subjects, and an unforgettable nude silhouette replete with oversized cowboy hat. These works are complemented by the more allusive touch of Sheida Soleimani, an Iranian-American artist and activist who has gained widespread recognition for her assembled photographic collages and tableaux. Touchstones from her Iranian immigrant heritage are present in a number of these meditative compositions, as are affective similarities with the works of Man Ray and Charles Wilson Peele. Shadows, flatness and pictorial space swirling around a memory almost able to be articulated. 

Brittany Nelson, Tracks 2, 2019.

But for me, what made this show successful was the leap made between stealing silently through the kitchen (pace Arbus) and getting a grand glimpse of the cosmos. This is far from an original conceit; one of the most iconic scenes in Jean-Luc Goddard’s filmography similarly spins entire galactic rotations out of a single cafe cup swirling creamer.  And yet, the scale shift is compelling all the same. In the gallery, Soleimani’s airplane juxtaposes with the aerial work of Brittany Nelson. In her work, legacy approaches (e.g. bromoil printing, Alfred Steiglitz’ contact-abstracts of clouds) dovetail with more contemporary subject matter. Arguably, the strongest piece in the show is Tracks 2, a unique bromoil print produced from an image sent back to earth by Opportunity, the Mars rover that outlived its companion Spirit rover and its own expected breakdown by nearly a decade. The solitary image-making robot has personal overtones for Nelson, who grew up as a queer person prone to gazing at the celestial vastness in her native Montana. In this light, the works are of similar vein to Felix Gonzales Torres’ slowlydesynchronizing clocks and asymmetrically disarranged beds, but extrapolated to interplanetary distance. These astral meditations on time and memory contrast favorably with William Eric Brown’s prints, with spraypaint overlays of digitized slides the artist’s father took on a US Navy tour through Antarctica in the 1960s, an alien world similarly shot through with feelings of the interstellar sublime—an almost airless world living under the confines own atmosphere. 

William Eric Brown, Atka 13, 2019.

There is clearly something in the air, or the ethereal vacuum. The fantastical possibilities of sending bodies to (and resources from) the artic wilderness, the deep ocean and outer space are suddenly becoming early realities. But as 21st century humanity prepares to venture into these beyonds, it is a hopeful note that we may take these steps in a more contextually aware manner than may have ever been previously possible. Researchers and activists like the singular Moriba K. Jah are bringing an indigenous history of resource preservation to rethink practices around the new commons of geostationary satellite orbital space.  And scholars such as Jennifer Roberts are beginning to unpack the culture of recent space exploration as a product of art history, as well as the history of engineering. As near real time as it can at a tiptoe, our image of self and universe are being reconfigured.  Or as Brittany Nelson and her lonely rovers might put it, there is no final frontier.  There is just ever further away… WM