Culture

Alan Chimacoff has found the poetic in the mundane. In his exhibition abstract.hyphen.realities at the FXFOWLE gallery, Chimacoff aims his camera at bits of the urban environment to "emphasize abstraction and ambiguity...and challenge their reality." What emerges are two alternating series—one "portraits" of double yellow traffic lines and the other of architectural details—that capture nuanced vignettes of the urban environment that surrounds any city-dweller.

Image c/o Alan Chimacoff (Y25)

In the Y series, traffic lines become characters in the apparent simplicity of the objective painted traffic line. They misalign in Y22, where the painter changed a roller or adjusted some mechanism, or they abruptly stop in Y37—a splash of paint at the end like a small exclamation. The pure geometry of the traffic line asserts itself in Y27 as it crosses different types of pavement undisturbed; however, that autonomy is completely undermined when it intersects utilities, like the manhole cover in Y35 that exerts its own logic and function as it has been rotated 90 degrees since the line was painted over it. Other traffic lines are over-painted masses or faded blotches as recurring seasons have taken their toll.

It's no surprise that architectural details figure prominently in the other series as Chimacoff practices architecture in Princeton, NJ. Many of the black and white photos document constructions by the usual suspects Frank Gehry, Richard Serra, Jean Nouvel, and Daniel Burnham. Form, details, and the subtle interaction of light and material all fall subject to Chimacoff's wandering eye. However, one photograph obviously has been manipulated in Sliced, a fragmentation of the late Raimund Abraham's Austrian Cultural Forum's façade. This led me to re-examine the other photos to see if I had missed some fast trick that Chimacoff was trying to pull.

Two other photos complement the exhibition. City Museum combines a few photographs in the gallery into a collage of buildings. While Quadryptich composes four vignettes of wall details and their oblique shadows into a single print.

abstract.hyphen.realities runs through Friday January 7th.

by Jessica Pleasants