Oliver Wasow began manipulating found photographs in the mid-1980s, alongside members of the slightly older Pictures Generation, some of whom exhibited at Cash/Newhouse, the East Village gallery Wasow cofounded with fellow artists Tom Brazelton and Karen Sylvester. Much like Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, et al., Wasow embarked upon an almost epistemological investigation of how pictures and symbols work, though instead of appropriating advertising images or art-historical icons, he made moody, saturated photographs of enigmatic celestial phenomena or UFOs silhouetted against soupy green, red and blue skies.
As this mini-retrospective demonstrates, Wasow has stayed true to his early enthusiasms, even in the age of Photoshop. Kaaterskill Falls, NY (1998) digitally melds details of Thomas Cole’s 1826 painting, The Falls of Kaaterskill, with a photo of a waterfall inset with a placid lake scene jutting above it like a billboard. Here, Wasow illustrates not only how pictures come from other pictures, but also how our notions of the American landscape have been conditioned by centuries of images that haven’t always been truthful.
Recently, Wasow has turned his eye to portraiture, another genre complicit in creating myths. Notable in this respect are the artist’s chilling headshots of Trump and Trump officials made to appear nefarious through subtle alterations of lighting and color. That series is unfortunately not in this show, but portraits of Wasow’s aged mother and downcast brother are. Posed in Windsor chairs set against Hudson River School paintings of Arctic icebergs, they appear not only as character studies in their own right, but also as illustrations of the American existential condition.