06 May 2009

Chelsea and Soho, not AIPAD



My quick late winter trip to New York was focused downtown. Stayed in Soho, had breakfast with Hee Jin at the Noho Star, visited the Donald Judd house with the foundation director (thanks, Barbara), did a quick swing through Chelsea on Saturday morning before beating a retreat to LaGuardia to catch up on work for a couple of hours prior to my afternoon flight home.

I thought I'd spend a lot more time at AIPAD, but the abundance of images and ego-tangents was overwhelming; my brain shut down after about an hour. But I did enjoy seeing work by Jan Groover, Gabriele Basilico, and Louviere + Vanessa.

Hee Jin recommended my stops in Chelsea, and I was grateful for her suggestions--Florian Maier-Aichen, P-L diCorcia (installation of his "Thousand" project at Zwirner, above, below, and in this blog's banner), and Barbara Probst.





I thought diCorcia's installation was fascinating and bold, full of the intentional accidents that his work takes on frame by frame. It was the kind of show I'm sure many photographers dream about doing, but very few of them merit this sort of expanded view, a thousand images generated from many years of projects. I'm not buying many books these days, but I ordered a copy of this one as soon as I got home.

Myoung Ho Lee's Avedon-ed trees (the white background done with trees by James Balog, too) inspired me to make my own flora pictures as I snaked through the west 20s. Thank god for the cell phone camera.




I even made a picture that caused someone to call up a literary reference (after seeing it on Facebook, where I'm obsessively posting to the Mobile Uploads feature). My bicycle photo, below, reminded a fellow Minnesota-based writer of William Gibson's book, Virtual Light, which is about post-apocalyptic bike messengers in San Francisco. I was honored, and had to rush out and read the book.



"Proj on!" as Gibson's messengers say.