Artist Erin Shirreff (Born 1975 in Kelowna, Canada) examines how memory and photography may affect our perceptions and experiences of viewing art. Using a vocabulary of modernist forms, Shirreff manipulates objects to create temporary assemblages that she photographs. The artist often further manipulates the printed photographs, bending, folding, or breaking apart the images to create novel artistic forms.

In A.P. (no. 9), Shirreff made tabletop-scale compositions that evoke mid-twentieth-century modernist sculptures. For this series, she references the outdoor geometric works of artist Tony Smith and reflects on the different experiences of interacting with Smith’s sculptures in situ and seeing them reproduced in print. A.P. (no. 9) is a photographic image of a maquette made of foam core and plaster. The artist used photo-editing software to slice the picture in half and rearrange the composition. “In a way I don’t think of A.P. works so much as photographs as much as I think of them as pictures of sculptures that don’t exist. They have a strange physicality, they are images of sculptures but then the images themselves have these sculptural components. The pictures are folded down the center to reference this notion of book binding” says Shirreff.

Erin Shirreff’s (Born 1975 in Kelowna, Canada) work in sculpture, photography, and video investigates the distorting effects of memory and perspective on the experience of viewing art. Shirreff mines the distance between the general and the specific, employing a pared-down vocabulary of modernist forms to inhabit the space between an art object and our recollection of it. Her works explore the problematic nature of the photographic index as well as the medium’s relationship to the mechanisms of vision and perception. Her investigation often assumes the form of manipulated photographs of objects that are created explicitly to be photographed and then destroyed. By bending, folding, or bifurcating the printed photograph, Shirreff creates new forms, challenging the perception of photography as static and objective.

Catalogue, 39 parts (Value Lessons) exemplifies Shirreff’s ability to employ the essence of modernist sculpture to new effect. Comprised of an arrangement of smooth, gray geometric Hydro-Stone elements arranged atop a series of level surfaces, the sculpture alternately resembles a table, workbench, and desk. The “legs” of the horizontal planes are simplified geometric forms also culled from the visual lexicon of twentieth-century sculpture. The title references the ubiquitous nature of the forms in relation to the history of art: the objects strewn on multiple surfaces—arcs, cylinders, and cones—represent what Shirreff considers the building blocks or “blanks” of modernist sculpture. By bringing these modules together, Shirreff highlights their universality and interchangeability. Here Shirreff seeks not only to blur the line between our memory and the actuality of experience, but also to blur the divide between the functional and the aesthetic.

Photographer Jimmy DeSana (Born 1949 in Detroit; died 1990 in New York) was part of a countercultural punk community of artists and musicians living in New York’s East Village during the 1970s and ’80s. He made portraits of many important figures from that scene, including singers Debbie Harry and Billy Idol, as well as of his friends and lovers, who recur in his photographic work. He also played a definitive, though often under recognized role in the rise of photo-conceptualism in the 1980s—a genre that would question the very nature of photographic representation. DeSana specialized in staged tableaux where he photographed himself and others, usually naked and alone in color-saturated interiors. Striking unlikely poses with carefully chosen props, his body would oscillate androgynously and erotically between subject and object, person and fetish, enabling a visual association of the unconscious. Mediated through the lens of the camera, DeSana’s subjects, iconic and anonymous alike, become pliable forms that move within and among layers of culture and representation.

In Marker Cones, DeSana crouches laterally on all fours, his slender figure poised on inverted orange cones that cap his hands and feet. Photographed from behind, his body becomes a headless, unidentifiable creature comprised of triangles and parallelograms. The marker cones evoke a similar sexual indeterminacy, gendered feminine as makeshift stilettos and masculine as the detritus of roadside construction. Dramatic lighting cast his skin in a feverish and sexy glow. A glittering field of tinsel-like artificial grass adds to this surreal photographic composition.

Photographer Jimmy De Sana (Born 1949 in Detroit; died 1990 in New York) was part of the countercultural “punk” community of artists and musicians living in New York’s East Village in the 1970s and ’80s. Among his best-known works are portraits of important figures from that scene, including Debbie Harry and Billy Idol, though these constitute only a small part of his practice. With work that is personal, surrealistic, and often shocking in its treatment of sexuality, De Sana helped raise the standing of photography in the art world and increased critical respect for the medium.

101 Nudes comprises 56 halftone black-and-white photographs of nude and partially nude figures posing inside or just outside homes. The artist was 20 years old and attending college in Atlanta when he first printed the series in 1972. The figures, which include De Sana’s friends as well as himself, are photographed from a variety of viewpoints. Although the series shows the influence of “grainy” pornography from the 1950s, the postures of the figures do not seem to suggest or invite sexual engagement; the artist noted that they are “without eroticism.” Sometimes the photographs feature only a fragment of the body, such as the pelvic area or buttocks. De Sana’s engagement with the history of surrealism has been noted, and these partial views in particular recall the surrealist photography of artists such as Man Ray, who in the 1920s photographed the body parts of friends and lovers in ways that removed them from their context and made them into almost abstract images.

Doris Salcedo (Born 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia) distorts the familiarity of everyday objects, transforming domestic furniture into menacing statements of violence, mourning, and trauma. The artist has made powerful sculptures and installations since the mid-1980s that build on the memories and testimonies of victims of political persecution during the civil war in her native Colombia.

In Untitled Salcedo displaces the imagery of household chairs, modifying their form and function while adding new layers of significance. This work is part of a larger series in which she evokes the violence of state interrogation techniques practiced by corrupt governments. To produce these works, Salcedo made wax models of the sculpture and collaborated with a New York-based factory to create the stainless steel models. The chair, once a support for the body, is presented as a disabled form—missing backs and battered corners—that speak to brutal and violent actions.

2012.21

Richard Prince (Born 1949 in Panama Canal Zone, Panama) is one of the most influential American photographers of his time, having come of age during the 1970s and the heyday of appropriation. While the artist also creates paintings, sculpture, and installation, his photography has made the most lasting contribution to contemporary art history. By the early 1990s, Richard Prince and his iconic Marlboro Man images had become synonymous with the genre of appropriated photography and the problems of artistic authorship. During the mid to late ’90s, the artist moved from New York City to upstate New York, and his focus turned to more personal and immediate subject matter.

Upstate comes from a series Prince made to document an environment and lifestyle completely separate from the locus of the art world and excesses of New York City. These stark images of above-ground swimming pools, abandoned cars, and grassy fields highlight an isolated yet strikingly common vision of rural America. Prince finds moments of beauty in these overlooked and undervalued features of the landscape. For instance, the single-story, personal storage facility has a row of orange roll top doors—their serial quality evoking Minimalism—and sits within a bleak landscape. While Prince’s photos of his environments draw on a long history of photographers locating decisive scenes in unremarkable places (i.e., Walker Evans and William Eggleston), Prince’s focus on the rougher aspects of rural life distinguishes his work.

Luther Price (Born 1962 in Marlborough, MA; died 2020 in Revere, MA) was a Boston-based filmmaker and video artist who constructed pieces by using found footage drawn from a vast array of sources, including documentaries, pornography, and Hollywood features. His practice involved physically manipulating film, exposing the medium to extreme conditions by scratching, painting, and distressing the surface, or even burying it underground to collect dust, insects, and mold.

In Number 9, the artist produced four hundred slides projected by five carrousels in an evenly spaced row and simultaneously looped, an arrangement that connects his work with animation and early cinema. For each slide, Price combined recycled imagery with film he had shot himself and overlaid this visual imagery with hair, ink, and organic materials. He exposed the film to conditions which allowed for rot and the development of mold, aiming to distort and abstract the imagery. The individual slides vary vastly from silhouettes of monstrous insects to abstract patterns, from earthy tones to brilliant reds and oranges, resulting in a visually arresting experience. The artist has said about this work: “With Number 9, I feel I move to a visceral context very familiar to me in an autobiographical sense. I have a physical background in sculpture. So this work in particular is very 3-D.”

Luther Price (Born 1962 in Marlborough, MA; died 2020 in Revere, MA) is known for his work with Super-8 and 16mm film, particularly for constructing films out of discarded prints of documentaries, snippets of Hollywood features, and other fragments of cinema. He physically manipulated this found footage by scratching, distressing, and painting the film surface, or even by burying it in the earth so that natural processes such as rotting and mold growth begin to change the film. Price also experimented with handmade slides, beginning with found film that he painstakingly cut up, reassembled, and altered. Some plates have sandwiched detritus and found materials—from insects to dirt, dust, and glue—finalized in a projected image on the gallery wall. Through his reuse of analogue photographic materials, Price produced beautiful, abstracted images connected to histories of appropriation, abstraction, and experimental film.

Light Fracture is one of two slide works Price made in 2013 that are held by the ICA/Boston. Using slide projectors, he presents the handmade slides as a cycle of moving still images, an arrangement that connects his work to animation and early cinematic tropes. The individual images vary dramatically—from the microscopic to the macroscopic, from silhouettes of monstrous insects to beautiful abstract patterns, from dark earthy tones to brilliant reds and oranges—but taken as a whole, the series consistently captures light as it is projected, refracted, and splintered through the materials. The result is a visually arresting experience that evokes entropy, mortality, and otherworldly visions.

Jack Pierson (Born 1960 in Plymouth, MA) is a multidisciplinary artist who addresses the tragedy and comedy of the struggle for public recognition and fame. Using photography, drawing, painting, installation, and sculpture, he engages symbols that communicate the folly and artifice of glamour. Often trafficking in clichés and hackneyed aphorisms, Pierson’s ironic oeuvre draws attention to both the fleeting nature of fame and the perception that one must die young and beautiful in its service. The artist is perhaps most recognized for his public “signs”—large-scale, brightly lit words such as “paradise,” “maybe,” or “lust” created from a hodgepodge of discarded building signage of varying typefaces and styles—that could equally be concrete poetry or ransom note.

The small sculptural work Applause is a re-creation of the sign used in television studios to direct audiences to clap at predetermined moments during tapings of a show. With the deadpan, satirizing gesture of transforming the mechanism into art, Pierson skewers the manipulation intended to heighten the secondary audience’s enjoyment. By editioning the re-created sign, he further vitiates its original on-site function and hence its meaning. The electric sign flashes on and off in a slow rhythm that mimics the pulsing adulation associated with the entertainment industry.