Amy Granat, Peter Coffin, Nathan Hylden
There’s a good photo show going on right now at Chez Valentin and where I was pleased to discover a collection of photograms by Amy Granat. These abstract images created by exposing photo paper to light in various ways are at once ghostly and attractive – the paper is usually literally “ruined” in some way (ripped corners, etc,). The pieces play with intentionality; the physical works are not perfectly glossed up images but rather unsettling sketches, perhaps the photographic equivalent of displaying a painter’s palette as a work of art.
The Peter Coffin show at Emmanuel Perrotin is pretty lame; the neon abstract wall works are terribly unoriginal. The log with a disco ball inside is a funny juxtaposition of two elements that bear little relation to one another (is celebrity culture killing nature?), though the piece would have been better had it been hung from the ceiling (I realize it’s heavy, but it’s also Perrotin)… The one piece that really caught my eye was Untitled (Slow Motion Campfire), a video from 2009 documenting a campfire burning in black and white (not sure if it’s looped). Like a real campfire, it’s completely mesmerizing, and makes viewers reflect of the relationship between video and any “natural spectacle.”
Nath Hylden’s show Once I Get Started, at Art: Concept contains a series of great painted/silk screened abstract works on a variety of different supports (metal, canvas, etc.). White overpaint obscures abstract planes of light and dark divided by purple haze borders. The haze and whily drops of paint remind me of universes in scientific images of space. This viewer thus alternates between a macro view of “planetary” content and a micro view that considers the materials and surfaces that Hylden embraces.
