Follow Friday: Five Galleries Invite You to Play With Perception
This week’s Follow Friday includes galleries with a seemingly endless variation of offerings, from classic 20th-century photographs to prints of YBA artists to groundbreaking post-internet digital artworks.
Robert Mann Gallery, New York
Specializing in 20th-century photography and contemporary artists working creatively within the medium, Robert Mann Gallery includes a unique array of important photographic influencers, as well as young artists. Available works by Ansel Adams, Weegee, and Robert Frank are among a roster including the bizarre domestic scenes of Holly Andres and Jeff Brouws American landscapes. Currently on view is “The Embroidered Image,” which experiments with photography’s stylistic limits. In Flore Gardner’s The Holy Family (2012), jagged halos of alternating colored threads are stitched around the heads of the subjects in an antiquated family photo, a crafty intervention that is both playful and eerie.
Paul Stolper Gallery, London
This gallery is a leading publisher of contemporary prints, but also exhibits unique works from numerous emerging and established artists. On view currently are a series of prints from YBA Angus Fairhurst, known as a champion of conceptualist-influenced cut-outs and art world practical jokes. Fairhurst’s prints range from echoing the work of John Baldessari to that of Richard Prince, though they retain his signature style of playing with forms and utilizing cut-out techniques. Stolper also represents Damien Hirst, Shepard Fairey, and Susie Hamilton.
envoy enterprises, New York
Founded by Belgian contemporary artist Jimi Dams in 2005, envoy was one of the first galleries to abandon the Chelsea scene in favor of the Lower East Side. Currently on view is “Raving Disco Dolly on a Rock n’ Roll Trolley,” an exhibition that explores the relationship between chaos and rationality through a disparate group of artists and works. Among those included are Niall McClelland, whose mind-bending linear compositions (made painstakingly with a Sharpie marker) appear both digital and organic. Also in the show is a 1986 video of a performance by the legendary and influential New York artist and gallerist Hudson, who passed away earlier this year.
GRIN, Providence, Rhode Island
Located in Providence, near the Rhode Island School of Design, GRIN was founded by Corey Oberlander and Lindsey Stapleton as a venue for fellow contemporary artists aiming to cultivate an environment that is both accessible and intellectually stimulating. The gallery recently exhibited Leah Piepgras, who has created a series of surrealistic amorphous sculptures with foam and resin, and mounted them on reflective Plexiglas for a viewing experience that is both provocative and interactive.
M+B, Los Angeles
Los Angeles-based contemporary gallery M+B is in the midst of “Soft Target,” a large group exhibition organized by photographers Phil Chang and Matthew Porter, the latter of whom is known for his surreally dramatized depictions of muscle cars in mid-air. The show explores, “...how the art object can exist simultaneously as a fraught and productive meeting point,” according to Chang. Among M+B’s other artists are post-internet mastermind Jon Rafman and experimental photographer Hannah Whitaker.