Carriage Trade

Social Photography II

peter scott — 2012-03-01T19:59:06Z

Social Photography II is the second installment of a carriage trade benefit exhibition focusing on the relatively new medium of cell phone photography. Emphasizing no particular theme beyond how the cell phone camera is most often used, both artists and non-artists were invited to submit images from their phones and email them to carriage trade. The images will be printed on 5” x 7” paper and installed in a grid in the gallery.

As cell phone cameras become more ubiquitous, their function continues to evolve. Encompassing the varied roles of snapshots, visual notes, discrete picture taking, or the immediacy of citizen journalism, the cell phone camera lacks the intentionality of a point-and-shoot, resulting in a more direct recording of the “everyday.” Because of the proximity of cell phone images to the spoken word and text-based communication, the pictures are often a kind of visual shorthand to fill the gaps in between.

Social Photography II cell phone images can be viewed on:

Prints are available now on a first-come, first-serve basis and are limited to an edition of five. Please indicate your top five choices when paying at the PayPal checkout*. We will make every effort to ensure you receive one of your top picks.

Photograph purchase & pick-up:

by December 18: available December 20 (closing event)
on December 20 (closing event): available December 22

*Under "Review your information" click "Add special instruction to the seller" and list top 5 choices: "1)Artist Name-Title, 2)Artist Name-Title, 3)..4)..5)..."

image: Katarina Elven, Eclipse, 2011

Olivier Mosset

peter scott — 2012-02-28T19:43:14Z

For his exhibition Born in Bern, at the Bern Kunstshalle in 2011, Olivier Mosset drew on memorable aspects of his experience of that city as a child. One event that stayed with the artist was witnessing the aftermath of a derailed tram that came down the mountain and crashed into a large fountain in the city center. A little research by Mosset and the museum led them to Paul Gilgen, the photographer for the railway, who had photographed the tram after the collision. While the matter-of-fact composition of the photograph suggests a pragmatic concern for reportage of the event, the oddity of the tram's unexpected presence within the placid town square is confirmed by the inclusion of a perplexed local citizen within the picture's frame. The “direct hit” on the fountain by the tram forced two very different objects into relation with one another; the utilitarian railway car which, until now, had been limited to daily treks up and down the mountain, and the stone statue, anchoring the public square with its monumental presence. Their unlikely encounter is an almost dream-like, a surrealistic moment whose curiosity is fixed by the certainty of its existence as a photographic document.

Oliver Mosset Born in Bern, Switzerland in 1944, Oliver Mosset moved to Paris in 1962, where he collaborated with Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni and Michel Parmentier, (known as BMPT) who, through making each other's paintings, collectively asserted their ambivalence towards claims of authorship so central to the authority of painting. Mosset's paintings focus on the monochrome, a deceptively simple aesthetic concern that deviates between an “authorless” material object and a hand made “picture” that reveals nothing more than its intent to be viewed. Collaboration has remained an important part of the Mosset's work. Since BMPT he has worked with, among others, Marcia Hafif and Joseph Marioni, Andy Warhol, Stephen Parrino, Cady Noland, John Armleder, and “Indian Larry” Desmedt. He has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1990) and the Whitney Biennial (2008).

For more information, please contact:
pscott carriagetrade.org

peter scott — 2011-12-20T20:48:36Z

Color Photographs from the New Deal (1939-1943)

peter scott — 2011-11-29T04:20:35Z

Largely forgotten until the mid-seventies when they resurfaced in the Library of Congress archives, the color photographs of the Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information (1939-1943) document the later period of FDR's New Deal, an ambitious series of government programs designed to address the brutal effects of the Great Depression on the social and economic fabric of 1930's America. While the Library's archive of black and white depression-era photographs is more familiar and more often reproduced, the color images, taken within three years of the invention of Kodachrome film, are striking for their rich, saturated colors and rigorously formal compositions.

The images document industrial and agricultural labor, rural and small town life, as well as large-scale mobilization for the war effort in the early forties, and were intended as a kind of inspirational portrait of Americana in the face economic troubles and the growing wartime fears of “Hitler at our doorstep.” In response to accusations that the New Deal programs were too extreme in their reshaping of economic and social policy, Roy Stryker, who was behind both black and white and color photography projects, encouraged the photographers to provide supporting evidence for the necessity and purpose of government's role in ensuring the public's welfare after the near collapse of the country's financial system. While occasional charges of “socialism” and “communism” were levied against the New Deal, the goal of the myriad government programs that comprised it was in fact to restore capitalism after the speculative excesses that led to the crash of 1929.

The emphasis on both technical and formal invention in these images underscores the promise of technology and order in the face of the social and economic instability of the period. Seemingly borrowing from the formal and compositional experimentation of social realist propaganda, the earnestness and belief encoded in these pictures is hard to miss, while at the same time their aesthetic sophistication belies a professionalism that suggests a great respect for their intended audience.

Because the role of the FSA/OWI pictures was to encourage support for solutions rather than reveal the tensions in the social fabric which made the need for reforms obvious, what is rarely in evidence in the FSA/OWI archive are images of social unrest that was endemic to the 1930's. In an effort to offer a broader context for the FSA/OWI photographs, they will be exhibited with archival material that documents the major strikes and protests of the time, some of which were met with shows of force by the state. Revealing the pressure on the Roosevelt administration to respond to the desperate circumstances of large segments of the population who had lost faith in “the system,” this documentation finds many parallels in the spreading social instability that has come in the wake of more recent economic crises around the world.

image: Library of Congress Archive, Alfred T. Palmer, October 1942.

POP Patriotism 2002

peter scott — 2011-09-12T22:56:18Z

POP Patriotism, curated by Peter Scott at Momenta Art in September 2002, is being re-presented at carriage trade from September 22 to November 13, 2011. A note on the re-presentation of POP Patriotism in 2011:

In the panicked days, weeks, and months following September 11, 2001, many Americans were too overwhelmed to be aware of the way in which their fear was being appropriated by certain factions within government and business to further a set of goals, often having little to do with "security" or "freedom." An attack that seemed to "come from nowhere" stimulated an aggressive series of government policies and ad campaigns by businesses that reflected an acute understanding of the opportunity that this traumatic attack presented. In the ten years that have passed, this opportunism, from the failed "contract wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan (reaping billions for private firms while helping drive the U.S. deeply into debt) to the tapering-off of the patriotic spirit when it no longer served a consumerist agenda, has mostly faded from view. Buried under partisan conflict, which focuses on the liberal / conservative divide, the attention eventually fell on a series of "mistakes" by the Bush administration, mostly overlooking the gutting of the public sector for private profit (brilliantly outlined in Naomi Klein's 2007 book, "The Shock Doctrine"), launched with patriotic fervor in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

When POP Patriotism was first presented at Momenta Art in September 2002, the idea was to witness a momentary rupture which revealed some of the brutal contradictions of "free market" democracy by "freezing" it in the guise of a historical museum. The exhibition was intended as a kind of time capsule, perhaps to be opened at some later date, which might present an opportunity to examine, not through the gauze of memories or reflections, but with artworks and support material that came from the immediacy of moment. In representing the exhibition as faithfully as possible (accounting for a change in venue and the time that has passed) POP Patriotism now has the possibility to function as it was originally intended, as a historical record of an extraordinary period, the repercussions of which are perhaps still not fully understood.

past exhibition

Henry Codax

peter scott — 2011-06-20T19:52:48Z

PICTURE NO PICTURE

peter scott — 2011-04-21T18:24:28Z

No one seems to be sure what the decline of modernism's cultural influence, beginning sometime in the 1950's and 60's, has led to. The return of narrative and ornament in the art and architecture of the 1970's suggested an effort to break with the immediate past, but the privileging of rationalism as a guiding social order evident in the idea of markets finding their perfect equilibrium continues to dominate economic discourse, despite the occasionally irrational results. While architects like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas seemed to have represented "a new way forward," the prevalence of a creeping re-modernism found in the ubiquitous Corbusier-like, double-height urban lofts sheathed in glass and filled with mid-century modern furniture confirms the continued appeal of modernism's aesthetic essentialism.

In art, the early-modern conflict between non-objective painting and representation reached its peak and waned, as the eventual embrace of pluralism paralleled the development of a global, unregulated, free-market economic system. As pluralism was seen to have trumped ideology, the problem of content became increasingly slippery. With the historical determinism of the modernist project now suspect, its inherent iconoclasm began to look puritanical in the context of mass culture's iconophilia. The series of reactions to modernist orthodoxy (Conceptualism, Minimal Art, Pop Art, Appropriation, etc.) broke free of the aesthetic cul de sac of formalism's legacy, but certain aspects of modernist thinking (the primacy of authorship, novelty, the "white cube") have either lingered on or reasserted themselves within the arts.

Acknowledging the confines of discourse while highlighting its means of representation, PICTURE NO PICTURE hopes to raise questions concerning what can be "said," within the context of visual art. While the reductive aesthetic of the modernist art object proposed a set of limits to insure its autonomy and purity, much of the work in this exhibition employs a spare aesthetic that highlights the phenomenological experience of the gallery setting, underlining the significance of the art object's context to its reception.

As consumerism continues to expand, the endless manufacture of image and text produces a kind of baroque static, provoking restlessness rather than comprehension. Connecting through the abstraction of expanding personalized technologies has begun to take precedence over face-to-face exchange, encouraging the development of the subject into what Gordon Matta Clark once referred to as the "passive isolated consumer." In an era of increased physical disorientation afforded by technological short cuts which alter logical sequencing in time and space, the works in PICTURE NO PICTURE reflect on the limits and conditions of the exhibition space (both literally and metaphorically), while emphasizing the viewer's self-awareness as a key aspect in shaping their experience of a work of art.

image: Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 1996, Acrylic on canvas 24" x 24 3/8" (61 x 62 cm)

Jef Geys
Woodward Avenue

peter scott — 2011-02-10T21:56:52Z

carriage trade is very pleased to present Woodward Avenue by Jef Geys, a project first developed and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. This exhibition is a variation of Geys' Quadra Medicinale, at the Belgian Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale, a collaboration of four of the artist's friends who collected and archived “urban flora” in Brussels, Moscow, Villeurbanne, and New York. For Woodward Avenue, Geys asked the ethnobotanist Ina Vandebroek to collect weeds found on 12 intersections along a thirty-mile stretch of Detroit's main thoroughfare and document their properties (medicinal, poisonous, etc.). The results were collated into a multi-layered project which incorporates photographs, text, maps, and dried plant specimens, and is accompanied by a film of Vandebroek's 2009 workshop in Bolivia, which brought together indigenous healers from the rainforest and biomedical healthcare providers from Universidad Mayor de San Simón.

As an American city that experienced both the growth promised by the Fordist model and its gradual erosion in the global free-market system, Detroit is often associated with ruin and refashioned as myth. When government and business have “no answer” for economic insolvency, culture occasionally revels in it, offering patina as a salve for social malaise. With a refreshingly sharp wit and keen awareness of the interconnectedness of the ever-present and the overlooked, Geys' Woodward Avenue presents an idiosyncratic approach to urbanism, offering a precise archive of his subject that resists the obvious sociologies that often dictate our impressions of the city.

Part testament to the resilience of the natural world in the face of indifference and neglect, and part conceptual investigation into the complex interplay between evidence and site, Geys' examination of Detroit's main boulevard was organized and directed from his hometown in Balen, Belgium. Mapping the length of Detroit's Woodward Avenue, which stretches across the “natural” divides of socio-economic zones from Cadillac Square in the city's center to neighboring Pontiac, the artist combined the precision of a land surveyor with an organized conceptual model that involved a great deal of chance. Specific intersections were chosen by Geys and visited by Vandebroek, who took photographs and gathered field specimens. The evidence is presented as 12 framed works, which incorporate the actual organic matter of the plants as well as their photographic representation and precise geographic location.

Operating across conventional boundaries that often limit discourse within the social, the political, and the aesthetic, Jef Geys' Woodward Avenue is guided by an intellectual curiosity that incorporates collaboration and community, with a distinct conceptual method grounded by the unambiguous reality of plant life. Linking two seemingly different places in Bolivia and Detroit, the films included in the exhibition were made by Vandebroek during her workshop and edited with detached precision by Geys. Revealing sensitivity to the utility of indigenous plants among traditional healers which occasionally contrasts with the biomedical healthcare providers conventional practice, the films broaden the scope of the exhibition geographically, while underlining the persistent gaps in the promise of modernity routinely filled by the perennial resourcefulness of those on its margins.

carriage trade wishes to thank Jef Geys for the loan of his work for this exhibition, Ina Vandebroek for her advice on realizing the show at carriage trade, and Director and Chief Curator, Luis Croquer of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit for his important role in the organization and production of Woodward Avenue.

Social Photography

peter scott — 2010-12-20T04:22:07Z

Organized to benefit upcoming programming at carriage trade, Social Photography is an exhibition focusing on the relatively new medium of cell phone photography. As cell phone cameras become more ubiquitous, their function continues to evolve. Encompassing the varied roles of snapshots, visual notes, discrete picture taking, or the immediacy of citizen journalism, the cell phone camera lacks the intentionality of a point-and-shoot, resulting in a more direct recording of the “everyday.” Because of the proximity of cell phone images to the spoken word and text-based communication, the pictures are often a kind of visual shorthand to fill the gaps in between. Emphasizing no particular theme beyond how the cell phone camera is most often used, both artists and non-artists were invited to submit cell phone images of their choice via email to carriage trade, which the gallery printed on 5" x 7" paper.

Those interested in acquiring any of the photographs from the Social Photography exhibition should please contact the gallery, pscott carriagetrade.org. Photographs can purchased after February 5, 2011, for 75 dollars each (subject to availability).

Another Green World

peter scott — 2010-09-30T02:48:18Z

Betty Beaumont

Betty Beaumont's images of camouflaged cell phone towers reveal the absurd characteristics of green washing in its most concrete form. Transforming the look of “natural” into an insidious theatrical device, these cloaked towers appear as various forms of trees depending on their region or climate. Turning the Darwinian notion of natural selection on its end, the fake evergreens and palm trees represent a “permanent” state of nature and remain immutable save for the interests of real estate and development. Beaumont's almost deadpan treatment of the towers, photographed straight on and filling the frame, lend her subjects the quality of portraiture, revealing the hidden identity of the transmitting cells that are masked to make this relatively new technology appear green.

Jennifer Bolande

Jennifer Bolande's “Sandwich Board” presents an ambiguous relationship between commerce and the natural world. On one side, a black and white line drawing of dying trees is articulated in a spare but expressive style. On the reverse side, a blurred close-up photograph of lush green trees fills the frame. Possibly an acknowledgement of the growth and death cycle of nature, seen in this context the images might refer to their “grow or die” parallel in capitalist enterprise. As the sandwich board functions like a billboard for the pedestrian street, the sign invites the passerby to consider the “added value” of nature, an elastic commodity that can bring benevolent associations to all manner of goods and services.

Vija Celmins

While the depiction of the landscape was once motivated by belief in its divine origins, Vija Celmins post-photographic naturalism exists as an entity unto itself, a handmade interpretation of a mechanical facsimile of the natural world. Once nature could be replicated through technology, the question became not about its creator, but how these phenomena could be more and more precisely described. In a reversal of the assumed progression of “nature into culture,” the tromp l'oeil quality of Celmins work simulates the machine made image, while assuming the inevitable flaws of a hand made artifact. Read from a distance as photographic, but breaking down into intricate detail as one approaches the image, the logic of Vija Celmin's work asserts no hierarchy between the static nature of a picture made with a camera, and the accumulation of visible marks summoned to replicate it.

Neil Jenney

Neil Jenney's landscapes invoke an idiosyncratic Americana that negotiates the gap between the 19th century Hudson River School and contemporary art making. With bold lettering that both literally and figuratively frames the images, Jenney's subjects are made material, while their aggressive horizontality limits the sweeping views of the picturesque tradition. Confronted with close-up details of a larger scene, the planar background sky reveals no larger sense of place. Where the post-enlightenment viewer of a landscape was situated at its center, the viewer of Jenney's work, unmoored by its disorienting cropping, is instead grounded by the object that delivers the image. While Beirstadt enhanced the illusionist properties of his work by presenting them in dramatic light with curtains on either side, (in a predecessor to the epic and disembodied nature of film), the “stuff” which serves as the vehicle of Jenney's illusions retains as much significance as the imagery itself. Employing a purposeful craft which leaves traces of the author, the deliberate technique, monument-like frames, and “signage” employed in Jenney's paintings are at the same time evidence of a kind of classicism that speaks to the perennial need for a civic voice. Constructing an emphatic realism that reshapes the terms of 19th century idealism into a more self-conscious form, the rhetorical devices in Neil Jenney's work are made transparent, arriving at an unpretentious approach that applies a contemporary self-awareness to the American landscape tradition.

Barbara Ess

The 19th century landscape paintings of the American west often featured broad vistas and sunlit valleys, characteristic of a period of westward expansion. This optimism was revisited in Western films, where sweeping vistas were magnified by the big screen, a genre that some critics associated with the global ambitions of post-war America. As our borders have long become static and international conquests have gone astray, a defensive posture has set in. There are those who feel that our fixed territory must be defended, engendering a more claustrophobic and anxious view of the landscape. Barbara Ess's screen shots are derived from surveillance cameras along the U.S./Mexico border, set up and posted online by extra-governmental groups intent on “defending” America. Predominately comprised of low contrast, middle grey images, these views of rivers, bridges, and fields describe boundaries potentially traversed as a means of escape or an attempt better one's conditions. The stark, monochromatic nature of these (re)photographs suggests an unforgiving landscape, while the subtlety of their tonality parallels the seductive nature of voyeurism inherent in “spying” on the land. The omnipotent, bird's eye view isolated in Ess's images implicates the viewer in this process, as they're invited to scrutinize the landscape for potential aliens. The grainy, ill-defined quality of the pictures speak to the furtive and uncertain nature of this process, which seeks to assert control over one's anxieties through an imagined mastery and possession of the visible terrain.

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson

Filmed in New Jersey's meadowlands, the 1971 film “Swamp” explores a netherworld between nature and industrial society. As Nancy Holt negotiates the camera through dense thickets of swamp grass, Robert Smithson offers relentless and sometimes aggressive off-camera direction. In an occasionally tense discourse between Holt and Smithson, Holt “becomes” the camera (the eyeball) as Smithson “controls” the view. Enveloped in the vibrating, yellowish brown verticality of the swamp grass, the camera shatters the picture plane as it pushes its way through. Flirting with the sublime beauty of an abstracted landscape made tangible by the repeated knocking of the lens against the “elements,” the perils of exploration are parodied in a low-risk operation that nonetheless produces an ominous sense of dislocation and anxiety, playing out in the terseness of Smithson's direction and the occasional exasperation evident in Holt's off-camera voice.

Mathias Kessler

Adopting the Victorian era convention of landscape artist/explorer's Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, Mathias Kessler's photographs in Ilulissat, Greenland investigate what could be considered the “end of the earth.” Updating the sublime tradition in landscape that inspires both fear and awe in the viewer, Kessler's photographs of icebergs describe a reality which may one day exist solely as fiction. Possessing an eerie glow reminiscent of tourist sites from floodlights positioned on either side of the icebergs, the scale in the resulting photographs appears simultaneously monumental and miniature. Aware of his implication in disaster tourism, where the spectacle of “nature in reverse” increasingly draws fascinated crowds, Kessler's photographs begin with the uncompromised condition of untouched nature, transforming it into a picture of itself. The picturesque landscape tradition encouraged the individual to internalize views of idealized nature, which could then be imposed on existing scenery. In Kessler's beautiful but ultimately disquieting images, the view of even unspoiled natural setting exists for us as the already discovered. Perhaps a consequence of a century of landscape clichés that began as an attempt to manage the unwieldy character of nature by transforming it into a purely aesthetic phenomenon, the impending loss of “real” nature seems to have created an appetite for its eventual replacement by its reproducible double.

Gerhard Richter

The gestural application of paint in Gerhard Richter's “Overpainted Photographs” intervenes between the viewer and the photographic evidence of the subject. Covering parts of the image with seemingly random streaks of paint, Richter undercuts the certainty of the photographic image through the element of chance and the unambiguous materiality of paint on a surface. The “invisible hand” of the camera is displaced by Richter's own, an expression of ambivalence as to the function of authorship in photography. Richter's tireless exploration of both the affinity and dichotomy of photography and painting has at times exposed the tyranny of resolving this issue with an either/or answer. The artist's investigation of landscape also explores this ambivalence, flirting with cliché and pastiche that are embedded in the everyday vernacular of a photographic image. In “Grunewald,” this lack of resolution between the photograph as a painting surface or as illusion proves disconcerting. The densely wooded, starkly lit forest is partially obscured by dark gray overpaint, some of which is transparent. The veiled areas of the image only hint at what can't really be seen, while the closed-in nature of the woods obscures more than it reveals. The discrepancy between the “truth” of the photograph and the subjectivity of the painted gesture seem to resonate with the indecipherable denseness of the depicted forest, providing little space for easy resolution.

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