A twenty-three-foot-long still-life spans this New York artist’s latest exhibition, Free Transform. Its ultra-bright backdrop and array of subjects (houseplants, floral bouquets, fruits, vegetables, lobsters) suggest elements in a giant Colorforms set. The piece is named for a Photoshop tool that allows for fluid image manipulation—but digital editing is only one stage of Gordon’s idiosyncratic layering process, which relies on a variety of photographic sources. Images are printed, cut out, and rephotographed into tableaux.
For all their grounding in photography, Gordon’s pieces invite painterly comparisons: his composites are like stripped-down versions of seventeenth-century Dutch tabletop still-lifes, rendered in a Fauvist palette.
The exhibition also marks the début of Gordon’s sculptures: urns, pitchers, and vases, whose surfaces appear to be patchworked with ink-jet prints. These objects have a metamorphic, even magical presence, as if the wave of a wand had plucked the most charming props from Gordon’s collage-like compositions to show them off in three dimensions.
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