Cut, folded, pasted: Photography takes a twist and turn in the Getty's 'Paper Play'
Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography, on view at the Getty Center February 27–May 27, features works by UCLA photography instructor Matt Lipps, along with artists Thomas Demand, Christiane Feser, Daniel Gordon, Soo Kim, and Christopher Russell. All of the works included in the exhibition use paper in unique and innovative ways. Some create paper models with images gleaned from current events, popular magazines, or the internet for the express purpose of photographing them. Others cut, layer, fold, and assemble representational photographs to introduce tactile or narrative elements.
"Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography," a delightful teaser of a show at the Getty Museum, divides neatly into two complementary halves.
Three of the six artists in the show photograph collages or constructions they've made out of paper. Their works present as straight pictures, even if they've been composed through circuitous means.
The other three artists start with more or less conventional pictures and then set to dismantle the veracity and transparency that photography implicitly carries.
Curator Virginia Heckert gives the show a bit of historical ballast by including some precursors from the museum's collection: a luscious, shadowy print by Francis Bruguière and another by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, whose curled sheet could easily pass as a model of a Frank Gehry bandshell.
Each artist in the show is represented by just a few pieces, often from different bodies of work. Variety overrides depth, but the disparate bites amount to a satisfying meal.
In each of his three large prints, Matt Lipps visualizes a new physical or intellectual space through a montage of reproductions culled from reference books. He interjects an image of the great American West smack into the middle of a family home in one provocative piece; in another, he lines the shelves of an imagined archive with visual quotations from canonized photographers."— Leah Ollman, Apr. 24, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
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