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Rineke Dijkstra’s work offers a contemporary take on the genre of portraiture. Often photographing in an objective documentary style, Dijkstra captures her subjects in states of transition: boys becoming soldiers, new mothers, or girls growing up. As the artist stated, “I’m interested in young people because they’re not fully developed. You can only guess which direction they will go. They’re open, an open book, really. And I think that interested me because it is also sort of an abstraction. You can look at [young people] and really project your own feelings and thoughts.” A photograph, by its nature, presents a past moment, and Dijkstra’s portraits lie at the threshold of activity, either after or before an event transpires. The setting is typically devoid of extraneous details, highlighting only the evocative nature of a person’s facial and bodily expression.

The subject here, Almerisa, was six when Dijkstra first photographed her in 1994 at a refugee asylum in Leiden, Netherlands. The ongoing portfolio that emerged records Almerisa’s transformation from a young girl from the former Yugoslavia to a woman, now a mother, from Western Europe. Dijkstra’s compositions maintain a spare and consistent format (frontal symmetrrical, seated pose, blank background), accentuating the changes, both physiological and cultural, in Almerisa’s appearance over time. A time-lapse portrait of identity in formation, the photographs also record a broader social context of war-wrought displacement and hybrid belonging. Using a 4 x 5 view camera and an unusually long exposure time, the artist’s technique allows for a quality of detail not often seen in the digital age. Almerisa locks her eyes with the camera lens, as though studying the portraitist and by extension the viewer, summoning a reciprocal gaze.

The ICA/Boston presented the first solo museum exhibition of Dijkstra’s work and has built a strong collection of her photographs. These eleven prints from the Almerisa series join other photographic portraits by such artists as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, and Catherine Opie.

2012.2

The work of John Houck explores the possibility of combining multiple perspectives in a single photographic image. Though they appear to be digitally altered, Houck’s photographs develop from a meticulous analog studio-based process of layering successive images to create powerful visual assemblages. Inspired by his training as an architect, Houck constructs small 3-D models or still-life arrangements that he then photographs: “A depiction of space, rather than an actual space,” as the artist has said. Houck frequently turns to objects and materials in his immediate surroundings. In the 2013 series A History of Graph Paper, he created images of items from his childhood that his parents had returned to him. He photographed different iterations of the artifacts by layering, adding, and subtracting materials to create compositions that evoke the complexity of memory in relation to the objects we collect.

Houck’s Petals and Interleaves depicts three books—two open and one closed—staged on a white and gray paper. Houck painted four cubic volumes on the books, which disrupt the perceived space of the photograph. The painted elements point emphatically to the flatness of the picture plane, with the volumes painted on the books appearing as holes, suggesting a playful sense of depth. This work was included in the solo exhibition Playing and Reality—its title taken from a book by British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. Houck’s introduction of painted elements, sometimes as a layered part of the composition, other times directly on the surfaces of his prints, embodies a sense of playfulness modeled on Winnicott’s theories.

This photograph adds further depth to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of studio-based photography made by contemporary artists such as Anne Collier, Liz Deschenes, Roe Ethridge, Leslie Hewitt, and Sara VanDerBeek.

800.16.13

Fascinated by the relationship between sculpture and photography, Sara VanDerBeek constructs assemblages of objects and images that she then photographs to produce the final work. To locate the materials and images she uses for these fusions of photography and sculpture she searches a variety of sources—art history books, her family photographs, and ephemera she has collected. She shoots numerous rolls of film of each tableau before selecting one.

The sculpture at the center of The Principle of Superimposition 2 is a freestanding screen structure comprised of twenty-four image panels set against a seamless black background. The structure is inspired by a folding screen designed by architect Eileen Gray. The images making up the panels range from photograms found in László Moholy Nagy’s book Vision in Motion (1947) to an Erwin Blumenfield fashion photograph and a picture of women dressed in black burkas and posed on a patterned carpet featured in a Time/Life photography book. For several of the panels, VanDerBeek splices two images together diagonally, “like a filmic cross-fade made concrete,” as the artist has said. In one panel, the geometric patterns of a fifteenth-century Chinese ceramic vessel interpenetrate with a Leni Riefenstahl photograph of a Kau man painting.

This photograph adds depth to the ICA/Boston’s holdings of VanDerBeek’s work, and further strengthens the collection of studio-based photography, which includes works by Roe Ethridge, Pipilotti Rist, Thomas Ruff, and Lorna Simpson.

2017.28

Deeply invested in the examination of the historical relationship of photography and sculpture, Sara VanDerBeek often constructs assemblages of objects and images for the express purpose of photographing them. She draws her found materials and images from a variety of sources—art-historical anthologies, her family archive of photographs, and collected ephemera—and shoots numerous rolls of film of each tableau before completing the work as a single photograph.

The artist’s methodology includes splicing and superimposing, as seen in Continuum Blue. Here VanDerBeek has constructed a diamond-shaped collage, arranging four triangles of patchwork imagery to radiate out from a point in the middle. The content of the individual images becomes color and pattern, giving way to an image of simultaneity, like a moment seized in a filmic cross-fade. Almost visualizing movement, its effect is mesmeric.

This photograph joins another by VanDerBeek in the ICA/Boston collection, building the museum’s holdings of the artist’s work. It further strengthens the ICA’s collection of studio-based photography, which includes works by Roe Ethridge, Pipilotti Rist, Thomas Ruff, and Lorna Simpson.

2016.06

Eileen Quinlan’s staged and evocative photographs consider how the hand of the artist expresses itself in the photographic medium. Her work touches upon a wide range of subjects, from feminism, parenting, and aging to “screen culture” and existentialism. Early in her career, Quinlan was interested in the seductive qualities of a photograph: for example, how advertisements enticingly stage products to stimulate desire. This was part of Quinlan’s broader interest in “constructed” or, as the artist declares, “non-straight” images. Her images are not “trafficking in truth” but rather explore intervention and subjectivity through process and experimentation.

A Ground in the Air, whose title comes from a biography of the 19th century photographer Nadar, is a near-accidental composition combining multiple strategies. The artist shot a piece of canvas hanging on the wall with 4×5 Polaroid-type 55 film, and then manipulated the physical negatives to create the photograph. She etched on the negatives, stuck them together when they were wet, and then pulled them apart once dried, breaking the emulsion. The artist’s experimental process creates a palpable dynamism throughout the composition, particularly with the inscribed etches and the corners of this odd central “shape” pointing outside of the frame. The scratches and tears—both literal and visual—may echo Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum in his seminal text Camera Lucida as something that grabs and affects viewers. A Ground in the Air, along with many of the artist’s other works, are more than what they appear, enticing you to consider and look closely as the work.

The ICA/Boston organized Quinlan’s first solo museum presentation in 2009, marking the museum’s early commitment to this artist. Within the museum’s strong collection of photography, this seemingly non-figurative work by Quinlan diversifies our holdings. The artist’s focus on process and composition possesses a painterly intuition, bringing this work into dialogue with photographic works by Sandro Cinto and collages by Charline von Heyl.

2017.27

Employing a diverse array of mediums, Gabriel Orozco makes works that are infused with wit and insight. Often depicting banal objects submitted to absurd gestures, from a car cut lengthwise (La D.S., 1993) to an ice-cream cone placed on top of a bush (Ice Cream House, 1995), Orozco reveals the complicated layers that make up the quotidian with a humorous, Duchampian sensibility.

Yielding Stone Image comes from Orozco’s performance project Yielding Stone, in which he made a sizeable plasticine sphere—about the weight of his own body—that he then rolled through the streets of New York. The object picked up the street’s sediment and surface activity, literalizing the imprint of the environment. In this image, the ball has been marked by the grooves of the metal grating that covers the city’s underground power and sewage systems. The artist is both palpably present and absent: the stone becomes a stand-in for Orozco’s body, and the artist’s action is the origin of its movement. As Orozco has said about his interest in spheres, “I believe the idea of movement, circulation, containers, focus, concentration, pointing, all have to do with circular firms in motion and the connecting of circles and elements like individual bodies.” Invested in process and its visibility in works of art, Orozco pushes the definition of action-based works and their documentation through his sculptural and photographic works.

Yielding Stone Image introduces the work of an artist new to the ICA/Boston collection, and expands its geographical scope. The photograph serves as an apt introduction to Orozco’s work and joins a number of other works that explore the presence or absence of the body in everyday scenarios, from Ana Mendieta’s performative bodily imprints to sculptures by Charles LeDray and Cornelia Parker.

2017.26