This exhibition brings together the work of two young photographers whose pictures utilize the studio as a site of production. While there is an evident parallel between their practices—both artists compose and photograph temporal situations in their studios—this exhibition aims to articulate divergences as well as similarities.

Talia Chetrit’s pictures make use of traditional photographic props such as lamps, black velvet, discarded paper and the human body. Despite their apparent simplicity, her silver gelatin prints transform rather ordinary studio materials into pictures that are surprisingly elusive. Chetrit’s minimalist pictures mine the history of photography, pushing against the boundaries of the medium while unabashedly referencing and repurposing historic precedents. Even in her more iconic compositions (for instance Mask or Fist/Glove, both 2009), Chetrit’s images maintain an open-ended, almost cryptic quality. Her photographs knowingly skirt declaration as they invite us to ruminate not only on the ways in which we read images but also the various techniques and processes that go into their construction.

Daniel Gordon’s pictures begin with the Internet. Gordon scours the web for images, which he then prints out, cuts apart and assembles into sophisticated, yet makeshift, sculptural tableaus. The tableaus are then lit and photographed in one definitive shot. After each shot is completed, Gordon disassembles his ephemeral constructions, the components of which are discarded into clusters on his studio floor. These remnants are often used again in future pictures, creating an ebb and flow of material and activity not unlike the Internet itself—a nebulous field of interconnections, continuously shifting in density. As indicated by their titles, the pictures that Gordon has selected for this exhibition were each completed in a single day.

Work by Matthew Metzger in the South Gallery.

The three paintings in this exhibition explore the dependency and exchangeability within Figuration and Abstraction as a method to portray the liminal and fleeting qualities that compose aspects of being. Utilizing many of Abstraction’s familiar tropes – flatness, separate and pure color planes, and “pulled” paint – Metzger alternately depicts a worn Home Depot carrying cart, a tattered walking cane, and a scuba “diver down” emblem as signs through which to consider the possibilities that open at the breach of one’s capabilities, the very moments when the body forgoes control and accepts the weight of exterior forces.

In Anthropometry, Untitled, Metzger renders countless scuffs and abrasions that have collectively accumulated on the surface of a Home Depot carrying cart. These marks that remain become traces of one’s inability to lift and transport materials that are both produced for and within a “do-it-yourself” context. Here, notions of originality and authorship are submissive to the illusory qualities of paint, while the fatigued surface of the cart points to the submission of bodies under the weight of commodities. Metzger’s Performance Corridor features a walking cane positioned vertically against a black and white abstraction. The height of the painting is limited to the maximum height of the cane rendered, as its width embodies that of Bruce Nauman’s Performance Corridor, originally constructed for his work Walking With Contrapposto. As Nauman sways slowly up and down his corridor, he is forced to halt at each bodily shift in order to retain the frozen stance of Greek and Roman sculpture. A pause that becomes crucial in witnessing the juncture between one’s historical lineage and the present. For Metzger, that pause is removed as the cane allows one to maintain the contrapposto stance while in the process of movement. The painting, The Dead Man (The Dead Toreador), capitalizes on the scuba “diver down” emblem’s normative role as an alert for boaters to take notice of the waters occupied by a diver. By recontextualizing the emblem as a “geometric abstraction” situated within the literal frame of Edouard Manet’s The Dead Man (The Dead Toreador), Metzger calls attention to the problem of occupancy, regarding both the duration in which one inhabits a space, as well as the contexts in which one chooses to paint. That being said, the notion of occupancy becomes linked to the “memento mori”, a reminder of the temporary nature of existence.

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Tags: Tony Wight Gallery, West Loop