Back to the future: 'New Tableau' photo show at 516 Arts puts new life in old techniques

There is a very good show up at 516 Arts in Downtown Albuquerque through May 31, featuring nine contemporary artists — most of them New Mexican — who make psychological portraits by collaging and otherwise manipulating photographs.

The title, “New Tableau: Experiments in Photography,” is a bit misleading, since the techniques employed — with the possible exception of Zuvya Sevilla’s use of thermal imaging — are not particularly new. Collage, montage and double exposures have been around for over a century, and cyanotypes — which feature in at least two artist’s works — date from 1842.

Still, the work is strong, and curator Daniel Ulibarri has done a commendable job giving equal weight to each artist — not an easy task when Jesse Draxler’s “Pillar 2” is nearly two stories tall and other works in the show are postcard-sized. But, by placing the more intimately scaled and subtly hued pieces in the upper loft space, he gives everyone space to shine.

Ironically, what’s “new” about many of the works in “New Tableau” are their handmade, analog qualities. Now that camera phones let anyone take unlimited instant photos without film, and AI lets us conjure images out of thin air, there’s a growing interest in slowing that image-making process down. Like the “slow food” and “slow fashion” movements, or the revival of analog instrumentation and field recordings by some electronic music producers, the “New Tableau” artists lean into older, slower art-making techniques that treat photographs as material objects, emphasizing their tactility.

Take Stefan Jennings Batista’s “Dust to Dust” photographs, printed from dust-covered vintage negatives that the artist manipulates using a white pencil. His anonymous portraits with glowing faces recall the work of American Civil War-era spirit photographers like William Mumler, who convinced many people, including Mary Todd Lincoln, that he really could photograph dead people. Batista’s images are similarly eerie, and his use of dust as a painterly medium gives them an antiquarian appeal.

Ramona Zordini, an Italian artist, constructs deep, layered photographic reliefs in shadow boxes. She begins with cyanotype self-portraits, slightly faded, which she somehow dissolves or carves away in spots, creating cavernous openings in her own face and body. As in Renaissance paintings of martyred saints, Zordini’s beatific expression contrasts with her implied physical disfigurement or decay. In lesser hands, these pieces could easily veer into pseudo-spiritual kitsch, but when I spent time with her work, I felt that I was getting a direct, almost physical understanding of how trauma manifests in the body, and how psychological transcendence feels. And, while her decaying cyanotypes look like old crumbling manuscripts, and her imagery harkens back to Catholic Renaissance art, it’s also like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

The painterliness of Zordini’s work is echoed in Roger Ballen’s creepy, expressionistic images of tortured spirits and bat-people, which he made by wiping snow and frost away from windows, then photographing the temporary snow paintings. Ballen is a highly problematic figure in the photo world. A white New Yorker who moved to apartheid South Africa in the early 1980s to work in the mining industry, he rose to fame by taking photographs of impoverished, mentally ill subjects. I don’t like him, but I do like these window photographs. And his attention to pre-photographic, analog processes provides a useful correlate to the other work in the show.

The installation “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” (“Thus Passes the Glory of the World”) by Nick Tauro Jr., consists of a series of photographs of the artist’s father, who was a Latin teacher, printed onto the yellowed pages of a textbook he taught from. The images are painted over with a thin layer of encaustic wax, giving them a muted, elegiac quality. Since Tauro’s father suffered memory loss in his later years, the layering of nonchronological images onto untranslated words from a dead language mirrors his father’s mental confusion and decline.

Downstairs, Ryan Dennison, a queer Diné artist, has an intriguing installation, consisting of cyanotype reproductions of personal snapshots printed onto white handkerchiefs and suspended a foot from the wall. A projected video shows the artist performing in a convex chrome mask. Ulibarri says Dennison plans to further activate the installation with a live performance in the space, where they will wear a grid of cyanotypes “like an armor of lived experience.”

Jesse Draxler, Derrell Lopez and Emily Margarit Mason all use collage techniques to express fractured and fragmented selves. Draxler’s big wall installation of a single face doubled and quadrupled into multiple perspectives recalls David Seidner’s fragmented portraits from the 1980s, except that the scale changes everything. Draxler’s smooth shoulders, cheeks and shaved head become rock formations, silent and impassive.

Lopez uses vintage Polaroid film to make cubist self-portraits — a bit like Maurizio Galimberti’s — but his best, most original pieces are the ones where his face disappears completely and becomes a color field painting. Similarly, Mason’s fresh, freewheeling photomontages mix legible images with abstraction, and I look forward to seeing more of their work in the future.

Zuyva Sevilla’s thermal imaging photographs and video projections showing live heat maps of visitors’ bodies are some of my favorite works in the show. Like Julia Scher’s surveillance-themed installations from the 1990s and early 2000s, the interactivity of Sevilla’s work makes it fun to engage with, even while the themes of high-tech policing and biopolitics are alarming.

“New Tableau” showcases a great group of contemporary New Mexican artists, most of whom use very old techniques to reinvent psychological portrait photography for the 21st century. Exhibiting these artists alongside a few of their international peers, Ulibarri shows how robust the local experimental photography scene truly is here.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.