Roberts’s photo-essay Motherland, at the trousers. One imagines the pork loins as being
recently opened DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan birdseed for humans, and it’s impossible not
Bridge Overpass, Brooklyn) gallery Klompching, to think about the stink they produce as they
as I found myself balking at the press release’s ripen during the course of the show. There are
suggestion that Roberts’s series dispels ‘the also street signs, telephone cables, found
clichéd view of poverty-stricken post-communist posters and such culled from Bougatsos’s gamine
Russia’. The photos deployed now-systematic adventures. It’s nothing new (or perhaps it’s
tactics for capturing a region of the world – so old it’s almost new), but Bougatsos’s wild,
stunning landscapes paired with full-body poetic jouissance is attractive and genuine.
portraits of the local colour, from Cossack
soldiers to wrestlers (photos which, in the (14)
best cases, suggested Rineke Dijkstra; in the PInAR YOlACAn Maria,
worst, Wes Anderson). Roberts was wise to let Rivington Arms
his content do the talking, and more often
than not, Russia’s history loomed unsettlingly For this show, Turkish photographer Pinar
in the background like a nagging reminder. The Yolacan has made a series of opulent portraits
brightly coloured Chechnyan market scene of about colonialism and the damage it has done
Outdoor Market (2005), set against a row of to cultural identity. It includes 22 colour-
decimated brick houses, may be the most heavy- saturated portraits of women shot on a small,
handed evocation of this residue, but it is economically depressed island off the northeast
equally one of the most elegantly wrought. coast of Brazil. They all have the look of Old
Master-style portraits in which figures emerge
(16)
Sex in the City,
Dumbo Arts Council
Sex in the City considers the most delectable
property of sexuality and successfully channels
it into aesthetics: with so many ways to say
no, curators Dean Daderko and Marina Adams
celebrate ‘so many ways to say “yes”’. Most of
the works appeared to benefit from the
libidinous framing and delivered the erotic
goods to more or less immediate degrees (though
I’d challenge the inclusion of Edie Fake and
Dewayne Slightweight: D.D., they’re twee
asexualists, not eroticists!). My favourite
may have been A.K. Burns’s Title (2007),
comprising a slab of frozen grey acrylic paint
atop a pedestal (which, by the time I encountered
it, had left a mess of McCarthy-esque defecation
on the gallery floor). But in a show predicated
on the have-it-your-way ethic of contemporary
sexuality, the only thing my critical preference from a pitch-black backdrop and are bedecked
could possibly say about me is that I’m a in sumptuous, colour-rich drapery. The fabrics
stone-cold fetishist. were bought from local merchants, and some of
the garments are made with placentae and other
(17) animal parts. Yet almost all the women appear
Site Matters: Brooklyn Represents, totally natural in these crazy outfits, and it
Brooklyn Arts Council says something of Yolacan’s skill as a
photographer that she is able to elicit so
Given the palatial scale and curatorial much attitude and self-confidence in her
virility of the Dumbo Arts Council, I had high sitters. One lady is totally at ease with a
hopes for its borough-wide superior. Yet I pair of testicles hanging around her neck.
left its exhibition disappointed and bemused: Apart from their obvious aesthetic and
not because all of the artwork on display was sociological appeal, the pictures ride a very
of middling quality (though some of it was), fine line between patronisation, exploitation
but because the gallery consists of the hallway or ridicule and a genuine desire to make a
and conference room of the council. It’s powerful image that is sympathetic to her
impossible to perambulate the space without subjects.
absorbing some of its offic(ial)ism, from the
blandly patterned chairs to the perma-hushed (15)
tones of the phone-shackled staff. Raster Haircut, Rental
(18) For those (like me) not familiar with Rental’s
JASOn GAnDY Atixip: Te Foxl, concept, it’s a ready-made space that
Rabbitholestudio international galleries can hire to mount
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