Exploring photography through a routine avoidance of its essential tool—the camera—Adam Fuss merges the medium’s earliest techniques with its newest. Here, the artist fields selections from three recent bodies of work that share an epic scale and a vertical orientation. While their impeccably presented strain of refined quasi-abstraction sometimes leave a deadening impression, there’s no denying the artist’s consistency of vision and attention to form.
The main gallery is occupied by black-and-white photograms of water flowing. They’re the kind of pictures that can look dull in reproduction, but the originals reveal an absorbing play of droplets and ripples. Elsewhere are tall photograms of curtains, their gentle moiré effects created by the folds of sheer fabric.
And in a third group, distorted scans of snakes wind their way calligraphically down linen panels. Fuss describes his work as symbolizing the boundary between old and new ways of taking pictures, but its interest lies mostly in the details.—Michael Wilson