Ingenious Methodology

Alex Harsley. My Sister From the Window. Toned Silver Gelatin Print. 18” x 24”. Courtesy Ch’i Contemporary Fine Art.

Ch’i Contemporary Fine Art

Brooklyn - New York

February 12 - March 9, 2009

By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde

 “Ingenious Methodology” -the collective show inaugurated last February 12 at the Ch’i Contemporary Gallery in Brooklyn, New York City- gathers a group of artists who are working with a wide variety of subjects and are interested in different approaches to artistic creation. In “Ingenious Methodology,” artists printed the images on several types of surfaces such as canvases, plexiglass, layers of glass, watercolor paper, and color acetate transparencies mounted on glass (as in Gina Fuentes Walker’s series of small images). Their use of these alternative techniques is related to their individuality as artists, and their intimate poetics.

Landscape is the main theme of the show. In every case it prevails as a subjective, lyric dimension. Cesare Bedogne calls his series Innerscape. He tries to grasp the moment in which seer and sight are integrated. Michel Demanche, who focuses on abandoned landscapes, shows black and white pictures of spaces full of mist and loneliness. Shelton Walsmith exhibits small photos printed on watercolor paper. He takes the pictures from the ground, so the spectator gets an unusual viewpoint from sand or rocks. Alex Harsley’s photographs are also related to loneliness: images of streets under rain or snow, with few pedestrians.  Chuck Walton reduces landscapes to almost an abstraction, with sharp contrasts between black and white. Other artists like Jimmy Serkoch and Leslie Sheryl are also interested in landscapes as a subject for their pictures. They both add a touch of the oneiric to their images.

Another genre shown in “Ingenious Methodology” is the portrait. Gerard Mokasky’s War Paint consists of color pictures depicting portraits of women over 40 putting on makeup. His images have a strong psychological and, at the same time, hedonistic accent. They are a celebration of an almost unnoticed moment of everyday life.

In other cases, the use of the human body is related to social art. In a series of portraits printed in cibachrome, the Chinese artist, O Zang, deals with emerging values in contemporary China, with the new superposition of traditional culture and Western capitalism. Reiner Weidmann shows pictures of emigrants in which there is a sense, a movement that could take us to futurism. The Peruvian artist, Marita Contreras, uses the female body upside down in order to explore the boundaries between sexuality and power. In another direction, there are Wanda Remington’s works. She explores the possibility of handwriting and integrating poetry (she uses John Ashbery’s verses) into the visual.

The unity of the exhibition, however, lies in the artists’ appeal to techniques which are alternatives to digital photography. In that sense the show proposes a twisted step back, in which old-fashioned or traditional techniques, like silver gelatin, become marginalized and sophisticated procedures.

Ernesto Menéndez-Conde is finishing a PHD in Romance Languages at Duke University. He has published in magazines in Havana, Spain, and New York. He has also collaborated with Marlborough Gallery and Sotheby’s in New York.