reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow is on view at the Aperture Gallery in Chelsea. The exhibition was organized by the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and aims to highlight not just the best young photographers coming out of the world’s top schools, but the most durable. The show is global in a truly 21st-century sense; just when you expect to find certain cultural conventions, borders slip away from you - most artists these days seem to be born in one place and living (and working) somewhere else.
Four of the artists participated in a panel discussion tonight - Chih-Chien Wang, Angela Strassheim, Josef Schulz, and Shigeru Takato.
Chih-Chien Wang is a native of Taiwan but lives in Montreal. His interest in photography grew out of filmmaking, and it’s easy to see how he has used it to examine his life as an outsider. His photographs – of himself, his girlfriend, and things in his apartment - are quietly clinical and insular.
Angela Strassheim (above) was the most interesting speaker for me. She is close to my age and went to college in Minneapolis, and I especially liked her photographs at the Whitney Biennial (see my earlier post). Once a forensic photographer for a city morgue, she has turned her eye on families and especially on young women who, as she says, are undergoing transformation. If there is such a thing as a feminine sensibility in art, I would venture to say that it can be found in her observations of family rituals and their replication in successive generations.
Shigeru Takato’s photographs of television studios around the world are exuberant affirmations of the powerful role of the media. The images register as otherworldly, with a flavor of science fiction. He describes TV stations as pockets of human emotional energy, sending out rays that reach beyond the planet and into outer space.
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