Multimedia Works That Explore the State of Nature
By Nadia Vellam, March 12, 2015
In this weekly series, T’s photo editors share the most compelling visual projects they’ve discovered.
Robert Heinecken famously said about his photography that it is “not a picture of, but an object about something.” For the artist Nadja Frank, her practice — which combines photography, silkscreening and sculpture — creates a larger conversation about the human desire not only to record experience, but also to consume and collect it. The materials she uses in her conceptual objects influence both the structure and the content of the resulting images. For example, in “Self Check Out,” an exhibition with Grayson Cox currently on view at Planthouse Gallery, Frank has set up a series of silk-screened stones from her personal archive in opposition with sculptures that seem to echo the geode “innards” of the stones. Nearby is a piece she created with Cox: “Lost in Reality,” an image of an iPhone capturing a landscape, in which the enlarged, pixelated smartphone screen becomes the focus of the work. Frank investigates how technology has changed our relationship to nature and space; her marble slab mounted with four Super 8 landscape images serves as a reminder of how attempting to capture nature often serves only to distance us from it.
“Self Check Out: Grayson Cox and Nadja Frank” is on view through April 15 at Planthouse Gallery, 55 W. 28th St., New York, planthouse.net.