Today was a beautiful day to stroll around Chelsea (especially compared to the brutal winds on my last visit). With lots of time and no museum shows to visit, I was able to leisurely work my way from 19th Street up to 26th Street, enjoying quite a few of the exhibitions along the way.

One show I was particularly looking forward to — Gregory Crewdson at Luhring Augustine — didn’t disappoint. Even though I love photography, in many photography shows I find myself just moving from one image to another without any need to spend a lot of time on any one image. But the Crewdson photographs demand more attention and it’s worth it. They are beautiful on a purely formal level. The camera is placed for perfect composition and everything fits together: edges don’t touch awkwardly and positive and negative shapes give each other enough room to breathe. The photos are large (approximately 59×90 inches), perfectly printed (inkjet!) on luster paper. But beyond the formal, the images draw you in and as you look around the photo you find one symbol after another: a turned over shopping cart, a broken window, an illuminated street sign. In almost all of the images, one or more old American cars (Pontiacs, Buicks) share the stage with figures who are often alone standing outside a building or under a bridge. Occasionally a pair of figures are visible in the car or in a building window. I found the typical Crewdson cinematic setups to be less intrusive in this show than in the past and the narratives less creepy and more psychologically interesting.

For a completely different kind of photography, see Ion Zupcu’s show at Clamp Art. These small (15×15 inch) black-and-white gelatin silver prints are abstract, geometrical swirls and angles. A few of them look like aerial shots of Richard Serra sculptures, but in fact the artist is photographing black paper in natural light that the artist has folded, twisted, and sculpted into interesting shapes.

I’ve stumbled upon Devorah Sperber’s work at a number of art fairs in the past: you’re walking down the aisle and at first you notice a wall of color splotches, but then you look into a small crystal ball and those splotches (really spools of thread all strung together) are shrunk and inverted, and voilà, you get the Mona Lisa or a Vermeer. When I stumbled upon her show at Caren Golden Fine Art this time, it was the subject matter that was most surprising: images from Star Trek! There are a few of the spool thread works, complete with mirrored balls that do the shrinking and pixelating, but when the images resolve you see Mr. Spock or Captain Kirk. In addition, there are a few pieces that are made from hanging strands of glass beads and these shimmering images read like figures in the process of being beamed up. There’s also a piece made with “chenille stems” (i.e., pipe cleaners!) to do the pixelation.

At the Dike Blair show at D’Amelio Terras, the room is filled with dozens of small inkjet prints of eyeballs scanned from the artist’s previous paintings. This reminded me of one of my own paintings from several years ago of my own eye. The question raised by this show, however, is: if the press release is itself an inkjet (or laserjet) print of one of the eyeballs in full color (albeit at a lesser quality), do I now own one of the artist’s works (unsigned, of course)?

Kim Foster gallery has two intriguing photography-based shows. First, Sherry Karver makes large black and white prints of digital images and uses them as a kind of grisaille for a subsequent oil painting. Layers of glazed color are added so that it’s hard to tell where the photo ends and the painting begins. The subjects are people caught moving about in a crowd, such as on the street or in a train station. Some of the figures are superimposed with fictional texts that are a kind of psychological description of the characters’ thoughts or hidden histories. I don’t usually enjoy text works as they demand a certain kind and direction of attention, but these were worth reading, full of sadness, insecurity, and sometimes humor.

The other show at Kim Foster by artist E.E. Smith contained a series of hyper-grainy “oil prints” made from cropped, enlarged photos. (The press release says that the artist hand coats watercolor paper with a light-sensitive coating in order to make the prints.) The resulting images look like conte crayon renderings. As with the Karver show, the subject matter is people caught in the act of doing their daily business and the grainy imagery of the prints has the look of surveillance photos.

One of the galleries in the huge David Zwirner space on West 19th Street contains a series of James Welling “photograms” (camera-less photographs, a few of which are also on view at the Whitney Biennial). The artist has taken window screens and cut, twisted, and sculpted them into torso-like shapes and then laid those shapes onto photo-sensitive paper to create beautiful, biomorphically abstract images.

Alexander Ross, whose works I loved several years ago at Feature Gallery and also at the Whitney’s “Remote Viewing” show, has moved on over to Marianne Boesky’s gallery (see the NY Times article, “Dear Gallery: It Was fun, but I’m Moving Up”). Unfortunately, these works don’t seem to have quite the same dimensional pop as the earlier works which so fascinated me. Some of the large green paintings are still quite interesting — blobs of green organic shapes (based on the artist’s clay models) rendered with gradients of color on a blue background. But they look flatter than in the past and aren’t quite as playful. In addition to the large oil paintings, the show also includes some smaller collages that mix photos of the artist’s paintings (or perhaps photos of the clay models) with crayon-like scrawls on paper.

Thankfully, not everything that I saw today was photo-based! I’ll save the descriptions for some fine painting shows by Thomas Nozkowski, James Sienna, and Julian Stanczak for my next post.