Highlights From The Photography Show presented by AIPAD

The Photography Show, presented by The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD), is one of my favorite New York art fairs. AIPAD’s location, the Park Avenue Armory, doesn’t require a great amount of stamina for visitors to experience the entire fair in a single visit. The public program’s series of panel discussions are some of the most organized and informative of art fairs.

The 2016 show did not disappoint. I entered hoping to find five favorites and ended up with six. These are the booths that initially caught my eye, drew me in and stayed with me long after leaving the fair:

798 Photo Gallery
Beijing, China

A display of large-scale, black-and-white celebrity portraits caught my eye, but how could one photographer capture Audrey Hepburn, John Lennon and Steve Jobs in their prime? Upon closer inspection, I could see that the subjects were not quite who they seemed to be.

Zhang Wei crafted his Artificial Theater series after being inspired by the cultural shifts he witnessed as traditional theater took on more contemporary aesthetics, as well as video games’ ability to create virtual personas.  Using repurposed images, he collaged together various pieces of performers’ bodies to create portraits of pop icons that serve as figurative schemata rather than literal representations.

Zhang Wei
Audrey Hepburn
2013
Pigment Print
100 x 130 cm
image courtesy of 798 Gallery

Zhang Wei
John Lennon
2014
Pigment Print
100 x 130 cm
image courtesy of 798 Gallery

baudoin lebon
Paris, France

Judith Peyrat’s curation of baudoin lebon was one of the more outstanding presentations of the show. The work of Joel-Peter Witkin and Ayana V. Jackson made me want to camp out in the booth for the remainder of the fair. The motion studies of Eadweard J. Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey provided historical context for Jackson’s To Kill Or Allow to Live series (2016). Jackson’s exploration of the medium’s history evolves into a meditation on the nature of justice for African-Americans in the United States. Jackson as Lady Justice, dodges bullets, making reference to and reminding the viewer that Black Lives Matter.

Visitors were also welcome to peruse through a metal foot locker of framed vintage erotica. Peyrat even provided a small exhibition catalogue. Galleries, take note – this is how to curate and prepare an art fair booth.

Joel-Peter Witkin
Portrait as a Vanitas, New Mexico, 1994
Gelatin silver print
34 x 28 in. (86.4 x 71.1 cm.)
image courtesy of baudoin lebon

Joel-Peter Witkin
Infantilism, San Francisco
1985
gelatin silver print
14¾ x 15in. (37.3 x 37.9cm.)
image courtesy of baudoin lebon

Eadweard J. Muybridge
Nude Woman Sitting on a Chair, Crossing Legs and Drinking From a Teacup
(Animal Locomotion – Plate 238) 1887
48 x 72
courtesy of baudoin lebon

Etienne Jules Marey
Falling Cat
1894
Still series taken from short film
courtesy of baudoin lebon

Ayana V. Jackson
To Kill or Allow to Live Series
2016
image courtesy of Ayana V. Jackson

Stephen Bulger Gallery
Toronto, Canada

I first encountered Stephen Bulger Gallery at Art on Paper 2015. The inaugural edition of the fair was lackluster as a whole, but Stephen Bulger’s booth was an exception. The reason was Gilbert Garcin, one of the most interesting photographic artists today. His late-in-life art career, DIY art practice and cult following make me want to hop on a plane to Arles and visit this man while he is still with us.

After taking a workshop at the “Rencontres Internationales” expo, Gilbert Garcin began his art career at the age of 65.  Using a miniature world in his studio, Garcin uses artificial lighting, cut-and-paste photomontages and readymade props to help transform that world into a photographic reality, casting himself in the role of the everyman wandering a fantastical landscape.

La tour d’ivoire – The ivory tower, 2002
© Gilbert Garcin / Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery

L’envol d’Icare (d’après Léonard de Vinci) – The flight of Icarus (after Leonardo da Vinci), 2005
© Gilbert Garcin / Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery

Le coeur de la cible – Bull’s eye, 1998
© Gilbert Garcin / Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery

L’irréparable – The point of no return, 2003
© Gilbert Garcin / Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery

Jenkins Johnson Gallery
San Francisco, CA / New York, NY

The outer wall of the booth made me stop and take a closer look at the work of Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle:

Her series The Uninvited reconstructs narratives of late 19th century and early 20th century West African ethnographic photography taken mainly by French colonialists. Through the embellishment of these photos, Hinkle uses the metaphor of disease to represent colonialism and the poetic interpretation of a virus entering the body. (Press Release)

Rin Johnson’s V. Poems are multi-media collages that combine photographic images – Johnson has stated her desire to “stay true to the moment I stole” by not distorting these images – along with text drawn from an algorithm that uses the New York Times as its source language.  The result is haiku-like titles such as “are you wondering who messed up and who performed above and beyond?” and a collection that plays with notions of authorship, creates playful non-sequiturs and examines the interplay between photography as document and accompanying text.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
The Convergence
2015
india ink, acrylic paint, Wite Out Correction Fluid, collaged paper 30×20 inches
image courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Rin Johnson
2015
After all, how much do you know about how your email is stored
mixed media collage
7 x 5 inches
image courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Johnson
2016
You and your girlfriend must come to an arrangement that suits both of you
mixed media collage
5 x 5 inches
image courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Lee Gallery
Winchester, MA

Michael Lee, the 35- year-old 14-year veteran of AIPAD, represented Lee Gallery, exhibiting an extensive collection of vintage photographs. The two pieces that captured my attention documented performances by Bill Viola and Vito Acconci in the 1970’s.

Bill Viola
Zona
1975
silver print
9 1/16 x 6 5/8 inches
annotated with a poem by Jalaluddin Rumi
image courtesy of Lee Gallery

Vito Acconci
Pull, April 1971
2-panel work made for Vito Acconci retrospective, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1978
image courtesy of Lee Gallery

Yancey Richardson Gallery
New York, NY

Yancey Richardson Gallery gave fair visitors a second chance to experience Zanele Muholi’s self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama exhibited in 2015.

Inspired by family, friends, society and consumer culture, Muholi experimented with different characters and archetypes, drawing on the performative and expressive language of theatre, and the highly stylized archetype of black and white fashion photography. The exhibition images form part of the ongoing series MaID (My Identity) or, read differently, “maid”, the quotidian name given to black women domestic workers. Individual portraits reference specific events in South Africa’s political history, from the advent of the mining industry to the fame and infamy of the “Black Madonna”, to the recent massacre of miners at Marikana.

A number of photographs are processed and printed to emphasize the blackness of the artist’s skin. As the artist states, “By exaggerating the darkness of my skin tone, I’m reclaiming my blackness, which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged other. My reality is that I do not mimic black; it is my skin and, the experience of being black that is deeply entrenched in me”. At the core of her photographs, Muholi strives to exorcise the culturally dominant images of black women that infiltrate media today. Press Release

Zanele Muholi
Thembeka II, London
2014
Gelatin Silver Print
19.5 x 18 inches
image courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery

Zanele Muholi
Thando I, Nuoro, Sardinia, Italy 2015
Gelatin Silver Print
23.65 x 16.5 inches
images courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery

Gallerist portraits courtesy of Alejandro RYOkEKEN Lopez.