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ADAA Art Show 2013

By Jean Dykstra, March 6, 2013

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Eadweard Muybridge Motion Study. Courtesy Lawrence Miller Gallery

Photography may not be the dominant medium at the ADAA Art Show at the toney Park Avenue Armory this weekend – that will come in April, when AIPAD takes over the building – but the photography booths at the ADAA are worth the visit. Well-curated booths, sometimes with museum-worthy exhibitions, are the norm, and one highlight  this year is Laurence Miller’s booth, filled entirely with collotypes of Eadweard Muybridge stop-motion studies. Muybridge’s studies of a horse in motion made on behalf of Leland Stanford are well known, but it’s a treat to see an entire booth devoted to his other motion studies – an elephant, a little girl climbing up onto a chair, a bird in flight, and a photograph of two semaphore-making fencers, among many others. 

In contrast, Metro Pictures took a minimalist approach: the only images in the booth were three large Louise Lawler photographs of the trunk of an Edgar Degas sculpture of a ballerina, in three different tints. A small black-and-white version of the photography was on the outer wall of the booth.

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Richard Misrach, Untitled (Blackwater I). Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery

Sean Kelly’s homage to Robert Mapplethorpe featured the artist’s rich, velvety black-and-white photographs of such artists as Andy Warhol, Laurie Anderson, and Louise Nevelson, channeling Norma Desmond.

Jeffery Fraenkel turned his booth over to Robert Adams images from his landmark book The New West, 1968-1977, unsentimental black-and-white photographs of tract houses and roadways near the Colorado Rockies that were a key contribution to the New Topographics. Pace/MacGill showed off some greatest hits, including a lonesome back-country road by William Eggleston, an Irving Penn of a gowned “Mrs. William Rhineland Steward” and the surface of a seemingly infinite sea by Richard Misrach (Untitled, Black Water I).

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Robert Mapplethorpse, Louise Nevelson. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery