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Higher Pictures presents the work of Los Angeles-based artist Gina Osterloh. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. Osterloh’s interdisciplinary practice brings together photography, drawing, film, and performance to explore the resonances between the physical form and its representational imprint, trace, or stand-in. Her work is marked by a tremulous tension between the handmade and the camera-ready. Record, mimesis, and illusion flow into one another as Osterloh’s minimally described spaces, imperfectly drawn lines, and unlikely portraits exploit and upset the conventions of mechanical reproduction.
A suite of photographs from the Copy Flat (2010) series feature Osterloh’s signature constructed set pieces. She builds three-walled rooms out of paper, paints every surface with a repetitive graphic pattern, and alternately fills the scene with flat cardboard cutouts of figures in silhouette. The silhouettes are themselves traced by the artist from the shadows of actual sitters; only shown from the torso or neck up, they nonetheless assert their personhood in different ways—some casting their own paper shadows and others turning their unpainted backs to the camera.
Osterloh’s Grid (2014) prints show wavering, hand-drawn gridlines on panels of paper that extend down a wall and onto the adjoining floor. Their scale, quivering energy, and uneasy translation of physical space give the distinct impression that the artist has just left the scene. That feeling is redoubled before the large-scale Drawing for the Camera (2014), in which the frame is filled with a freeform, meandering line drawing, again extending from wall to floor. Conflating the reproducibility and precision of photography with the unpredictable one-offs of sketching and performance, Osterloh pulls at the seams of photographic space.
While every work holds the suggestion of Osterloh’s presence, we only see her in Press and Erase (2007) and Press and Outline (2014). In Press and Erase Osterloh is seemingly disappearing up and into a void painted on the wall of one of her makeshift paper rooms. The 16mm silent film Press and Outline shows Osterloh pressing into her own shadow and then gently tracing the outline of its silhouette. A pang of longing for the impossible—a cleaving of the self, a disembodied existence—is palpable as the two figures perform their intimate mirrored choreography.
