NYAB Event - Miranda Lichtenstein “more Me than mine”

Miranda Lichtenstein “more Me than mine”

Elizabeth Dee

This event has ended.

Elizabeth Dee presents Miranda Lichtenstein’s fifth solo show at the gallery featuring new photographs and a collaborative sculptural floor installation with Josh Blackwell.

Lichtenstein’s exhibition reveals art’s transformative potential when it is incubated over time in a collective process, fed and activated by collaboration. For nearly two decades, Lichtenstein has worked in varied subgenres within photography’s historical archetypes: marginalized contemporary landscapes, refracted still life, performance based portraiture and process-oriented abstraction. Critic Barbara Pollack has praised Lichtenstein’s practice as being “a relinquishment of a decisive statement within the trends of post-appropriation photography working against the conventions of the photo-essay.”

In this exhibition, Lichtenstein presents a series of dynamic, outsized images of colorfully pop bodega bags that speculatively refigure their subject matter. The surfaces in these photographs, tensioned and topological, are derived from the work of New York based artist Josh Blackwell, who has altered and repurposed the bags through a process of intensive transformation involving cutting, puncturing, ironing, painting and stitching. With Blackwell’s generous invitation, Lichtenstein has spent over two years photographing his work, first in his studio, and then in her own. Photographs of these ubiquitous bags, many inscribed with “Thank You”, illuminate the troubling humanist/capitalist promotion of the individual as the center of the world, no longer separable from the petroleum-based, ultra-disposable product of the everyday. The affinities and admirations between the artists, the natural attraction between parallel practices, can upend singular agendas and unlock complex social and creative potential. It has allowed Lichtenstein’s images to represent several positions at once: our implication in ecological ambivalence, an inquiry into authorship, and the value of time to deeply examine another artist’s work.

The largest work in the show is a fully collaborative floor piece by Blackwell and Lichtenstein, using flatbed scans of Blackwell’s sculptures, inkjet printed, silhouetted and cut away. Together they have created an island of flotsam within the gallery’s main space.

The title of the exhibition, “more Me than mine” comes from the work of another artist Lichtenstein is in dialogue with, the poet Anthony McCann. His words encapsulate one of the primary queries of the project, proposing the possibility that the artist’s subjectivity could be embodied through de-emphasizing ownership.

Miranda Lichtenstein’s photographs have been shown in institutions including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Hammer Museum, the New Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum and most recently the Hèrmes Foundation in New York. She has been featured in Artforum, Flash Art, Art Review, Art in America and the New York Times. Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. and the Baltimore Museum of Art among others. She is currently included in Artist’s Choice: An Expanded Field of Photography curated by Liz Deschenes at MassMoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts through April 2016. She is an Assistant Professor in Photography at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.

Media

• Photography
• Sculpture

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