Michele Abeles

In a series of studio photographs titled "Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:", Michele Abeles arranges her compositions using knowingly awkward nods to the formal devices of the still-life product shot: bold lighting, original set design, vibrantly patterned backdrops, and picture-perfect resolution. The resulting photographs are rife with compositional mess-ups: dark shadows, abrupt crops, backdrops askew, overly reflective surfaces, hovering body parts, and conspicuous colored gels that humbly reveal the photographer's bag of tricks. Abeles imbues the hackneyed genre of the still life with acute instability, recalling something of Synthetic Cubist collage punctuated with tawdry, Made-in-China product placement. The artist muddies the subject of this series, which appears at first to be a study of the contemporary male nude. Yet, as her male models become more cropped, dismembered, and concealed, they recede-literally and figuratively-into the background.

Abeles's first subversions of subject and genre were done strictly in-camera, and they emphasized the devices available to her as a photographer in the studio. By contrast, her work beginning in 2012 reflects a wholehearted embrace of the digital. Characteristic of this output are chaotic shards of images overlapping and crisscrossing each other, packed layer upon layer and built up as digital files. To tap the vast and infinite image-space of the Google search engine is not Abeles's goal; rather, she builds these photographs up as collage assembled from partial copies of her own initial pictures.

In Flag Flag Flag, 2013, shown as part of "Empire State," we see the remnants of at least five other finished photographs by the artist: the white rope pattern against a pale pink background of Not So Optimal, 2012; the scuba fabric of Pitcher, Paper, Arm, Scuba, Lycra, 2011; an even smaller sliver of the digital landscape from #4, 2012; and the numbered, lined paper prevalent in a group of photographs from 2010. Also buried in this photograph are crude gestures: one, a quick drawing by Abeles of a DVD-ripping software icon known as MacTheRipper, and a portrait by Joan Jonas done in red paint on transparent glass that Abeles took from a still of Jonas's 1984 sci-fi video Double Lunar Dogs.

Flag Flag Flag - a riff on Jasper Johns's famous overlaying of three canvases - is not a deconstructed flag but a fusing of signs and signifiers that oscillate and hover, collapsed within a digital field that recalls the disrupting experience of toggling quickly between applications on a computer, or swiping across screens on your iPhone. As with Abeles's playful experiments in earlier works, the colors are garish and clashing. Left visible through a sheer white overlay is a downloaded stock photograph with a watermark created by the artist. Unsettling contrasts between light and shadow subvert the line between figure and ground.

Flag Flag Flag is shown in its complete edition of five prints, each one hanging at a slight counterclockwise tilt, as if to suggest that the series hangs from invisible flagpoles. Exhibiting all five identical prints at once contradicts the empirical quality of Abeles's studio photographs with immediate overexposure. That the repeating image is composed of earlier pictures reinforces this ambivalence toward a rapacious and reifying market. The result is a new sense of transparency in which views become fractured, overlaid, and confused, and copies of copies breed new originals-revealing a deeper sense of the complexities of visual experience.

Tina Kukielski