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Email PageWill Wendt Photographs
March 8, 2006- April 1, 2006
Will Wendt
Paul Kasmin Gallery
511 W 27th St Will Wendt Swimming Pool (2004) |
Among those included are photographs from "The Found Fashion Project" in which the artist subjects the visual tropes of fashion photography to the constraints of documentary to create portraits of his neighbors in the small New England town where he lives; the subjects dress in clothing from their own closet, presenting these items as models would in a magazine. "Snowbergs", a series of black and white photographs of snowbanks, are extra-luminous reflections on the New Topographic act of making photographs in ex-urban parking lots. But instead of the familiar critique of consumer culture, these photographs evoke turn-of-the-century alpine photography or images sent back to Earth from the Mars lander. "Classic Federal Highway System" is an hours-long collection of video stills with real time audio made over the course of tens of thousands of miles of interstate highway travel while pursuing a project photographing scenic overlooks, those temples to popular landscape photography. The result is an oblique tribute to all the photographers who ever crossed the country in search of photographs as well as a frenetic discovery of American Interstate vernacular. In "Scrims" the artist shifts into a decorative mode by aligning a chance pattern of colored glass beads and cut crystals with the focal plane of his lens in a kind of celebration of the transparency of his medium. The work was inspired by "Glaziers", Baudalaire's prose poem in which he violently instructs an unfortunate glazier to "make life beautiful".
By invoking both set-up narrative and documentary practice the artist's work manifests a world found anew and thus fulfills the poet's singular command.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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