Liz Deschenes at Fraenkel Gallery

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 Like a more bejeweled question of On Kawara: does the index/signifier retain anything of its original? The question is repeated ad nauseam throughout contemporary art. Like all worst aberrations of art, it's a question on life support, unanswerable and asked for affect of evoking it. 

conceptual art as one hand clapping: Yuji Agematsu, On Kawara at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Kirsten Pieroth at Mathew, Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, James Hoff at VI, VII

Liz Deschenes at Miguel Abreu

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A career spent negating the photographic window, pressuring the viewer out, left at surface, like looking out a window and seeing only glass. Early on Deschenes made landscape photographs of a spa town whose steam was eventually traded for silver, smoke for mirrors. And then there was also salt flats so grey and irregular they appear as mere noise, and the Moire patterns short circuiting your eyes and viewing, or the green screen years photographing what was intended to be digitally removed.  The photograms now are the result of a photograph without a lens, no focus but collecting all the light it touches into its photo-sensitive halides fixed as silver, photographs that feel like the information paradox of black holes: does the light that falls into the traps retain any of its information? Could you put back anything of the time or place? Maybe it doesn't matter, the point is to accumulate light for the gleaming of pressed diamonds.

Sarah Charlesworth at Campoli Presti

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Not being able to see the object inferred, the faintness and its soft faded form, leaving it where sight doesn't quite apprehend it, indefinite states where even though we barely see the thing we still think we know it. Charlesworth's excision of variables from photography leaves portions of its experience as it. Here we don't really see anything, but still see. Dropping the context from objects so we are left with ourselves reflected in them, nobody to hold your hand through it.  The coldness of such a practice might seem to border cruel.

See too: Sarah Charlesworth at New Museum