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ARTCAT



Walead Beshty, Popular Mechanics

PICK

Wallspace Gallery
619 West 27th Street, ground floor, 212-594-9478
Chelsea
March 3 - April 4, 2009
Reception: Tuesday, March 3, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site


With both a sharp and laconic aesthetic sensibility Beshty creates a photography of uncertainty. Cutting across several media, including photograms a representative example of the range of Beshty’s program Clever if somewhat vague referents presented as a subtly posed but effective arguments Beshty inserts himself into the historical flow.

But beware of the theoretical undertow. Photographs are created with very clear prescriptions read as luminous abstract compositions. But have a roughed up texture that says all you need to know. One can make much, perhaps too much, of Walead Beshty’s show. Beshty has included within the exhibition an assistant who toils like an art-world Rumpelstiltskin. This piece by Walead Beshty is briefly amusing. An accident that suggested the idea of deliberately using.

A revised concept of site specificity, now proposed as a function. Investigating systems of dispersal and production. Whatever Marxist schadenfreude might be gleaned from black-and-white. Effectively reclaims the found object as a multivalent political site. Of the show’s relaxed attitude toward lines of demarcation which, sexy as it sounded, felt like little more than rhetorical lubrication. Among the most special is Walead Beshty’s photo-slide meditation. Here flashy surface need not come at the cost of art historical,

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