Critic's Pick: New Material
by Kim Beil
In photography, “material” can refer to a picture’s content and to the physicality of the photograph itself. The eight artists in this ambitious group show address both uses of the word. Following the Getty Center’s survey last winter of midcareer photographers, “The Younger Generation: Contemporary Japanese Photography,” this show, titled “New Material,” could be subtitled “The Even Younger Generation,” as most of the artists were born after 1980 and engage with the force of Japan’s photographic history as well as contemporary global trends in the medium.
Many of the artists in “New Material” work extensively in book form. Narrative is critical to the work of Motoyuki Daifu, Momo Okabe, and Fumiko Imano, whose domestic photographs represent intimate pictures of the self, partners, and family. The challenges of printing, from material choices of paper size and stock to the often invisible process of reproduction photography, animate works by Hiroshi Takizawa, Daisuke Yokota, Kenta Cobayashi, and Naohiro Utagawa. In two untitled color photographs by Yokota from 2015, the photographic surfaces are destroyed by fire and chemicals, revealing layers of emulsion and creating a subtle topography of craquelure, blisters, and pearlescent fingerprints.
Takizawa slyly undermines photographers’ fascination with perceptual trickery. Recalling work by Daniel Gordon and Lucas Blalock, he combines real and trompe l’oeil depth in the series of prints and sculptures “Warp,” 2014¬–16, which features a black-and-white image of stone wrapped around the corner of a white wall. But Takizawa goes further: Two of these large prints are mounted on plywood, cut in half, and balanced on each other, eliding the distinction between artwork and display mechanism.