In August 2007, Jessica Dawson wrote about this exhibit as part of a longer review for The Washington Post:
Some pictures in "sub-text," a Randall Scott Gallery group show, are making me wonder. Can an image be Photoshopped into irrelevance?
That and other provocative questions about the state of photo-based artwork emerge in this five-person group show. The Photoshopping issue comes to us through Lindsey McCracken's hyper-manufactured landscapes where cows at pasture stand alongside massive stone bridge supports marching through the landscape like invaders from an industrial planet. A meteor shower rains from the sky above.
The attempt, I assume, is some science-fiction style contrast of nature and culture. Yet such extreme pastiche comes off as two halves not amounting to a whole. McCracken's agility with a mouse is flimsy glue for an artwork. Technology is a means -- not the end.
Alejandra Laviada takes photography's unreliability as her subject. The artist enters an abandoned office building and rearranges the furniture to her liking. Then she documents her own interventions. We all know that a photographer's eye mediates what appears in her frame. Here, both the image she captures and the capturing of that image are the artist's own.
Two female artists produce the show's most dismaying images. Both capture young women in much the same way that today's fashion rags do: inert, comatose and doll-like.
Leafing through the September Vogue made me yearn for supermodels sporting shoulder pads. Now that women have made strides in the working world, must they appear mute and immobile? Female artists, I put the same question to you.
At Randall Scott, Caitlin Phillips's work proves particularly enervating. She's an attractive woman, slender and young, and she takes pictures of herself. In one picture she wears a simple dress and cute shoes and holds a tea set while looking blankly at the camera. In another, she stands on a beach, masked and perfectly still, dressed in a flowery shift. In a third, she's nearly naked, in curlers and hose, pouting for the camera.
What possesses a woman artist to denigrate herself like this? Photography, in its many forms, dominates artmaking. But can artists use it wisely?
In August 2007, Mark Jenkins wrote about this exhibit as part of a longer review for The Washington Post:
Everything is two-dimensional in "sub-text," a first-rate photographic show at Randall Scott Gallery. Yet Mexican photographer Alejandra Laviada's "Juarez #56," a suite of 16 photos, is a fantasia of workaday objects. Shot in an abandoned office building, the images depict marred walls and shopworn junk, all of which could hardly be more ordinary. Yet Laviada is not simply an observer.
She's a choreographer of the obsolete, stacking battered chairs and pale-yellow telephones and scattering fluorescent tubes like pickup sticks.
Complete transformation is not her goal; all these things are easily identifiable. But she does find unexpected radiance in the industrial hues of coiled wires and battered brooms. Laviada's photographs offer a different definition of "useless" -- formerly useful things that are now outmoded -- only to find new use in their factory-made beauty.
The exhibit also includes Victor Cobo's sumptuously gritty images of San Francisco lowlifes, Lindsey McCracken's otherworldly views of the nexus between nature and man (and man's trash), and two approaches to female identity, by Sarah Wilner and Caitlin Phillips.
