Julian Montague’s The Stray Shopping Cart Identification System includes over 40 photographs from his ongoing series of works that document and classify stray shopping carts. Montague’s work has always functioned in multiple ways. Like a Weegee of retail detritus, he has become adept at documenting his subjects as though they were the splayed remains of some lurid crime scene. They are solid and often beautiful documents that hum with a dramatic realism, whether crushed, half-buried in snow, or submerged beneath murky waters. And while not quite anthropomorphized, they contain a certain residue of the human—they encourage speculation about their origins, their original usage, their unexpected journeys, and their often untimely ends.

But Montague’s shopping carts have also always been a springboard for the artist’s interest in forms of taxonomy and the implications of such systems. The carts, once documented, are segued into a prodigious system of categorization that aspires to include all potential designations. Carts are split into genus and subspecies and organized according to categories that are elegant in their specificity: Plow Crush, On/As Personal Property, Structurally Modified, Snow Immobilization, Train Damaged, As Refuse Receptacle, Bulldozed… Montague’s methodology reveals the care-bordering-on-reverence of all good scientists and cultural anthropologists.

What has remained intriguing about the series over the past few years is its elasticity. While Montague has remained true to his system, he has also remained free to play with the external manifestations of this system. He has alternately given the photographs and their categories varying degrees of emphasis and has rarely installed the work the same way twice. In its current version, the categories are minimized in favor of the images, but the images remain intimately-and accurately-connected through a graphic web of lines, a spider’s web of logic, inevitability, and absurdity.

Montague’s series has always recognized the problems of taxonomy by highlighting its inherent shortcomings-you can continue creating new species and genus forever-but his tone has never been mocking. There is a poetic momentum to Montague’s project, whereby even the most desultory subject can be described in earnest, affectionate terms and attain its own peculiar state of grace.