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art reviews from around new york

Life would be tough going, even if people did not put so many obstacles in their own way. One could try to clear them out by, say, spending less time alone with devices, viewing nonsense like mine. Sandi Haber Fifield delights in them—the ones she observes and the ones she creates in photocollage.

A barrier for her can stand in the way of knowing others, like the shadowy figures in her work. Yet it is simply part of life. It is the visual equivalent of memory, at Yancey Richardson through February 17.

Nature presents obstacles enough, from stony landscapes to dense undergrowth, and Haber Fifield brings them into sharp focus. The accumulated fragments in her collage create their own depth of field as well, layer upon layer. Her point of view shifts easily between face down and face front. One can feel oneself approaching things to push them aside. One can feel oneself, too, stepping back to find one’s footing. Her considerable white space may or may not help.

That is not to mention the built environment. Not that she necessarily distinguishes it from nature, no more than James Welling or John Houck—and I work this together with last week’s report on Welling and an upcoming one on Houck as a longer review and my latest upload. Potted plants with bare branches stand just outside a garage because her cuts place them there, but they could just as easily have grown there or landed there as home decor. A work crew must have piled those irregular gray stones. A man stands face to face with an entire wall of vegetation. Like the plants and stones, he may never find his way inside.

Much else, too, has no sense of home, only of barriers. That includes the one-piece plastic fencing that people love to hate—on top of her own thin strips of wood. A police cone has acquired colorful stripes and presides over torn branches in full leaf, like a memorial or celebration. If that suggests a death or absence, so do the silhouettes of boys at the beach. Do not, though, lose hope, for they are taking a break from exertion, and flowers, too, appear in silhouette. They are, the show’s title has it, “The Thing in Front of You,” and that is not the same as the thing in itself.

Mark Alice Durant, in the show’s catalogue, compares her attention to that of a well-known painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the epitome of Northern Romanticism. A man stands on a rock, back to the viewer, looking out on distant mountains and foggy seas. Still, Haber Fifield (no relation to me) is not so much commanding as creating, and the layers keep coming, defying distance. Brutalist architecture comes at you corner on, one side in shadow. Her angled cuts echo the building’s edge and her edge-on point of view. Once again, obstacles are just another word for experience.

Covid-19 brought its share of barriers to entry, but it gave her time, she says, to think. For the rest of us, what was there to do but take up knitting? And what was there to do after the lockdown but pick up the camera and get going? It may sound like a cliché, but Rachel Perry, at the same gallery, did both. She has not fallen for female stereotypes, but she makes the most of them. They become a window onto her studio.

Knitting for her is not folk art but Minimalism. And Minimalism, in turn, takes shape from the business of art in the present. Perry broke down cardboard boxes, delighting in the odd shapes that others would take to the trash. She also photographs herself with her work, in a floor-length dress of many colors, in diagonal stripes. She also keeps finding ways to hide her face, with her back to the camera or a mirror between her and you. Barriers take many forms, and they belong to artists that you may never see.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

When an artist leaves the big city for the Hudson River Valley after thirty-nine years, he might be in search of a new life. For Andrew Moore, it was just another good reason to pick up his camera and revisit American art.

Four years later, it is a show in Chelsea as well, as “Whiskey Point and Other Tales,” at Yancey Richardson through January 6. It should have anyone asking where he has been all these years and what he has found. It could be a stage in his life or a point of origins for American art. Now in his sixties, he is still on the lookout for both—and I work this together with past reports of photography in the city and country as a longer review and my latest upload.

It might seem a strange move. Thirty-nine years is a long time, long enough for many a career and long enough, too, to mark him as a city boy. Past series have taken him to Times Square theaters and the factories of Detroit. And the first thing he did after his student days was to head for New Orleans to record patterns of change in urban life. Come to think of it, many of those factories had fallen into disuse or decay since Charles Sheeler painted and photographed them starting in 1927, and Moore took care to compare and contrast their views. Decay will always have its appeal as the picturesque, but Moore knows enough to temper sentiment with precision.

Still, he had left town before to photograph the Great Plains, and he cites the influence of his great-great-grandfather, an artist who followed the course of the American railroad. As that suggests, he might wonder, too, if he had at last returned home. He grew up in one of the fanciest parts of Connecticut, and now he had moved up the Hudson to the Catskills, where residents relish their distance from the city. As a rural dweller might boast, he might even wonder if he had found paradise. It might have helped that he moved just in time to escape shuttered galleries after Covid-19. At the very least, his latest could pass for a fantasy.

Could clouds take on the deep reds of sunset in broad daylight, and could they descend anywhere like this, like jigsaw pieces to fit the buildings below? Could mists nestle into a valley as if arising spontaneously from the ground, much as they enveloped houses in Moore’s Detroit? Other mists deepen a grove of bare trees, while lending branches a perplexity of line and color. More light glows on the waters behind them, while other photos make it hard to know what is water and what sky. Sheep cluster for protection beneath more bare trees, while a dog keeps its distance. The dog knows enough to herd them while letting them feel free.

Like a proper paradise, this one has little need for people, but it does have room for him. Moore seems to have found a way to photograph himself at a fair distance as well, immersed in the stillness of landscape, but no: he had spotted a fellow explorer behind a camera overlooking a lake. Was it a follower of the Hudson River School updated for art’s media today? (The gallery cites a woman known for fantastic light and colors, Susie M. Barstow, along with Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Asher B. Durand in the nineteenth century.) Appropriately enough, Moore shares the gallery with Yamamoto Masao from Japan, whose spooky creatures depend on old-fashioned glass negatives.

So what has he been doing all along? For starters, he has always had a weakness for utopias, like old accounts of blue collar America and the settling of the American West, but with awareness of how things can go wrong. Other series have taken him to Cuba and Russia, with failed utopias of their own. For another, he has often found those utopias in past American art. Last, he sees in them an interchange between past and present. You may not need a shot of whiskey before joining the interchange—and settling into the confidence of wealth and class.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.