Michael Bühler-Rose

After Color examines how artists employ conceptual black-and-white photography to strengthen their ideas and how such usage comments on the dominance of large-scale, color photography as seen in the contemporary art world over the last 25 years.

In their work, Michael Bühler-Rose, Talia Chetrit and Noel Rodo-Vankeulen raise questions about medium specificity. Bühler-Rose merges a photogram of the word “edition” with hand painted numbers to ask: At what point does a piece become unique, and at what point is it an editioned multiple?

Chetrit reverses the photographic process by using Photoshop’s gradient tool to make digitally fabricated images into traditional silver gelatin prints. Situated somewhere between the photographic and filmic, Rodo-Vankeulen’s mystical and pulsating animated GIFs breathe life into banal and often stilted images.

In a reference to abstract expressionistic painting, Matthew Gamber’s photographs of excessively used chalkboards suggest a kinship between the chalkboard and film photography’s recording capabilities. Stephen Gill’s typological still lifes of discarded betting slips are formal studies of composition and shape. Using South Indian female archetypes as her subject, Pushpamala N playfully restages the representation of women in photography, whether it is documentary, anthropological or art historical.

Finally, Adrien Missika, Arthur Ou and Michael Vahrenwald redefine landscape photography. Missika transforms the Grand Canyon into small, quarter sized landscapes that mimic floating planets. Ou experiments with the transparency of landscape photography by adding decorative elements created in the darkroom to prove its flatness. Vahrenwald’s photographs of depression therapy light boxes, explore the relationship between landscape and self, or in this case, create a surrogate landscape.