Scouring Chelsea for modern spaces

Two recent gallery-opening-hopping excursions through Chelsea revealed a landscape beyond the rivers of cheap wine and rolling hills of salty finger food. Three specific photography exhibitions formed a commentary on the ways man-made spaces can be more-or-less (generally less) hospitable to human beings.

At the Hasted Hunt Gallery, the artist Lynne Cohen greeted friends and admirers of her photographs with a warm smile, and the usual postcard-sized exhibition flyer had been replaced by complementary exhibition posters for all. Her small format pictures in black and white show modern interiors that would be very awkward to live in and even oppressive to look at, had they not been altered by human interaction. In her pictures, minimalist living rooms are made inhabitable with the addition of ugly recliners and TVs, cold and isolating offices show the comforting wear and tear of their usage, and gaudy decorations undermine the uncomfortable sparseness of hallways and lobbies. Cohen’s pictures (on display until December 22) suggest a great sense of humor: she revels in the tastelessness of these modifications, just as she acknowledges their necessity.

Thomas Misik takes a different approach to alienating modern interiors. Unfortunately, he hadn’t shown up to his reception at Galerie Poller when it started at six – there was wine, however, and the familiar postcard-sized flyers. His photographs (on display until January 12) are in color, and much larger than Cohen’s. Instead of trying to show how spaces can adapt to human activity, Misik photographs modern interiors as though no person had ever set foot in them, like show-pieces meant for looking, not living. In his photographs we marvel at the poetic colors and shapes of the spaces we can create, how tastefully we can arrange furniture in them, like ornaments on a regal Christmas tree. Eventually though, the uncanny absence of human activity becomes undeniable, and Misik’s message crystallizes: how do we reconcile our obvious creativity, inventiveness and aesthetic refinement to practicality, comfort and livability?

A week earlier, an exhibition opened at the Charles Cowles Gallery with similar concerns, explored through completely different means. The photographer Edward Burtynsky was on hand, though he was only accessible to those important people (i.e. not me) allowed into the reception taking place in the gallery’s rearmost room. Is this because his pictures of industrial landscapes have struck such a chord with today’s art trend-setters that he now needs celebrity-style security strategies? Unlikely, although somebody did make a (very good) movie just about him and his work. This exhibition, “Quarries” (continuing through December 1), features large-scale color photographs of excavation sites around the world. If we say that Cohen and Misik are concerned with the ways modern humans construct their interiors, Burtynsky’s photographs capture the devastating ways modern humans reconstruct their exteriors – that is, nature.

These artists’ photographs are well worth seeing in their Chelsea settings rather than online or in book form (come on, it’s free and fun): the investigations of modern places and spaces are all the more pertinent when witnessed in their galleries, the ultimate sparse and alienating modern spaces. How then, we should ask, to make these galleries more comfortable and congenial? Certainly not by hiding the artists in the back room behind a velvet rope; maybe some comfortable couches and chairs would help. Until then, cheap wine, finger food and poster- rather than postcard-sized exhibition flyers will have to do.

A version of this article can be found on the New York Press's blog here.