The exhibition is not meant to be a survey of the field, but rather a showcase of recent work by young standouts. However, in recent years a few overarching trends have emerged. If the medium has seemed to close in on itself with the conceptual practices of artists like
Sarah Vanderbeek (included 2009) and
Elad Lassry (2010) — based in commercial product photography, their work relishes the static, hard-as-a-rock quality a photograph can take on when it captures an object just-so — it has also opened up to embrace a panoply of new techniques, pushing the boundaries of what has traditionally passed as photography.
Michele Abeles (shown in 2012) created bursts of color and a flurry of jostling planes in photographs indistinguishable from collage, as if Dada had arrived in the post-internet age via a brief detour through the 1980s.
Daniel Gordon (2009) brought
sculpture-based photography to a new level with his vivid mash-ups of objects culled from the internet, juxtaposing a DIY aesthetic of torn, pasted images with high post-production values. And last year,
Shirana Shahbazi’s abstract photographs once and for all showed that photographs can be about anything, or nothing, at all.