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Installation view, John Lehr: The Last Things, Kate Werble Gallery
By EDWARD WAISNIS January 18, 2025
There is the aura of appropriation in John Lehr’s photographs. Whilst this term is associated with the resuscitation of media infused in our culture by twisting it for aesthetic effect Lehr’s focus on extricating the quirks of the lived in environment subjected to cropping in the formal tradition.
Coming at things from the angle of storied traditions, grappling with technology and with the stilted sterility of the gallery, Lehr’s exhibition, hung with the humble handle The Last Things of seventeen photographs, framed in lean straightforward Plexiglas sandwiches, and three hybrid sculptures. With a legacy stretching back half a century, from Gary Winogrand and William Eggelston who praised the blaze of the everyday, from urban to rural, coming in hard on the absurdity to be found in the world, subsequently bridging to Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and the entire Düsseldorf School trained by the Bechers.
As Lehr is cognizant of this lineage (he is a professor of photography at the Pratt Institute, after all) his work supersedes the pressure of homage. In fact, while securely of their time, the work exudes a welcome gust from the ethos of Walker Evans that transcends full acquiescence to the ether of the digital. A catastrophe constantly seems a possibility just around the corner. This recognition of the heater-skelter carries on in the sculpture, but more on those to come.
John Lehr, Noan, 2020, pigmented inkjet print, 24.5 x 20.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York
The topologies Lehr presents are the residuals of choices made by people in the name of decoration, driven in interest of commerce. The sites Lehr gravitates to (comes upon) and preserves exude an eerie unease enhanced by an expiration date long passed relevancy. Charm is introduced by Lehr’s observation curiosity that taps a similar current to that paragon of championing British eccentricity Richard Wentworth.
The photographs have been installed with a staccato rhythm, unevenly spaced, hugging corners, making compensation for fenestrations, or accounting for and punctuating bump-outs, that is annexed to the graphic design. The erratic nature of the pacing of the hang is reflected in the placement of the image on the sheet itself lending a sort of visual braille rhythm. Nonchalant arrangement, promulgated by Richard Prince and carried to the present by Lee Mary Manning, that mimics photo collage, vernacularly used to group and display snapshots, in the family homes is a cousin to Lehr’s strategy.
John Lehr, Noan, 2020, pigmented inkjet print, 24.5 x 20.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York
Color tweaked for saturation in these pigmented inkjet prints frequents a contrasting teal green/vibrant orange combination in both Games, 2021 and Signs, 2022, also mirrored in the spray-painted fluorescent ‘x’ at the center of X, 2022, as well as the sharp moldings of Glass Blocks, 2021.
Flag Shadow, 2023, is just that, with an elongated grisaille projection lapping across the anonymous segmented wall of what assumes is a drab garage door and an accent of that teal coming into frame at the lower right corner. The wistful image conveys faded glory, or a reflection of a standard bearing a cloaked stance, or message. Longing continues in The Last Things, 2022, wherein a book, casually resting atop a sunny Kandinsky-influenced abstract painting (itself laid flat on concrete sidewalk or driveway) barely visible on three edges, with it’s flimsy paper cover curled open to the title page displaying the legend of this works title. There are glimpses of a second similar painting stacked below introducing a narrative of the painting being a discarded diptych; or, it might just be in preparation for a move. Raising the question as to whether this was a curbside tableau vivant discovered by the artist as seems to be his wont.
John Lehr, Art, 2021, pigmented inkjet print, 24.5 x 20.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York
Another work that conveys this quality of hope amidst loss, Tape, 2021, drills down on subject in the form of leavings. The eponymous material represented as ribbony models arrayed on an inflected taffy field. An encroaching slim accent along the lower right edge–a device that one quickly comes to recognize a Lehr signature go-to–of a partially legible product tag in a fiery red. Whilst Art, 2021, does another dance obscurantism, the mottled signage depicted has the elusiveness of a Jasper Johns ink on acetate, or the off-handed smeariness of a Christopher Wool spray and stenciled on a sheet metal substrate. An equally observant reference to painting is made by Target, 2022 with a sidelined reference to Kenneth Noland’s career-long depiction of an archers and shootists accessory.
Display, 2020, evokes the LED zippers of Times Square as well as Wall Street, connoting power (literally), commerce and progress. The other end of the spectrum can be found in the dazzle of the children’s toy Lite Brite; really, just a different facet given that toys are a main product fueling the ticking heart of commerce. Lehr’s politics are not worn starkly, but given their New York-centric (Lehr lives and works in Brooklyn and Philadelphia) flavor, the environs enshrined in the images speak to the exhortation of markets, from gilded towers to mom and pop shops.
John Lehr, The Last Things, 2022, pigmented inkjet print, 24.5 x 20.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York
Fire, 2023, showing an encroaching wall of flame abutting a neatly tended hedge, thereby serenely parlaying encroaching devastation with a matchup of contrasting blocks of color. The Los Angeles wildfires currently in the news offers an unwelcome kick.
Installation view, John Lehr: The Last Things, Kate Werble Gallery
The one sculpture in with the photographs, Sided, 2024, transports the locus of Lehr’s work directly into the gallery by means of an aluminum sign, with digital print that has been sectioned, and folded to conform to installation against an outside corner. Whether Lehr created the piece by hand, or came across it and modified it, contributes an air of enticing consideration.
John Lehr, Counter, 2024, wood, metal, 83.5 x 24 x 37.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York
Two other Lehr sculptures have been installed on the fire escape, euphemistically termed the terrace for the purposes of the gallery. They carry something forged by a flank of downtown artists in the 70s: Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas, Jean Highstein and Richard Serra. Like Lehr they were concerned with environment and boundaries, elevating these concerns to something akin to what the fetishization of perspective was in the Renaissance. Simultaneously there is a sheerness, a fragile slightness that is also present in the work of Rachel Khedoori. We’ve seen this before, but it was put asunder by the bended knee to Pop. WM
John Lehr: The Last Things
Kate Werble Gallery
474 Broadway, Third Floor, New York
November 21, 2024–January 25
Edward Waisnis is an artist and filmmaker. Additionally, he is the Producer of two Quay Brothers films, Through the Weeping Glass and Unmistaken Hands, as well as having overseen the facilitation of their 2012 MoMA retrospective. His writing has appeared in Art New England, COVER, ARTextreme and STROLL.
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