Bruce Checefsky: Other People's Money
Recent Photograms
[click on images to enlarge]

Untitled Composition from Strategies of Staging (#1), 1995
40" width x 45" height, unframed unique photogram, silver gelatin print

This features Checefsky's large-scale recent photograms -- silhouette images produced directly on photographic paper wihout the assistance of a camera or film.




Untitled Composition from Strategies of Staging (#2), 1995
40" width x 45" height, unframed unique photogram, silver gelatin print

Checefsky works primarily by arranging machine parts of all sizes into collages on rolls of photographic paper and exposing the arrangements to light via low-powered flashlight, overhead lights, and/or flashlight.




Untitled Composition from Strategies of Staging (#3), 1995
40" width x 45" height, unframed unique photogram, silver gelatin print

Art critic Donald Kuspit explains that Checefsky "makes the photogram something more than the technical novelty -- the arbitrary experiment-- it has been since the days of Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray.




Other People's Money (#1), 1995
40" width x 44" height, unframed unique photogram, silver gelatin print



He creates an effect somewhere between an X-ray, a map, and a template: an image that seems to show us the inside of an object, but that also seems to lay it out, and that finally resembles a blueprint model for it. All of this makes the object seem not simply unreal, but absurd -- a strange, alien construction....an altered consciousness, affording a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss of the prestructured --utterly unstructured--psyche.





Other People's Money (#2), 1995
40" width x 44" height, unframed unique photogram, silver gelatin print

Checefsky then has saved the photogram from itself, restoring it to radicality. Instead of being a dated gimmick, he shows that it can be a way of deconstructing perception."




Other People's Money (#3), 1995
40" width x 44" height, unframed unique photogram, silver gelatin print

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