In-Camera: Q+A with Zoe Leonard

For her first show at Murray Guy in New York, Zoe Leonard turned half the gallery into a camera obscura in order to consider photography anew. The fourth installation in an ongoing series, Leonard's lens, 453 West 17th Street (2012), cast an inverted panorama of the street outside, complete with a lustrous high-rise, across the gallery's dimmed interior. As their eyes adjusted to the low lighting, viewers found themselves immersed in an uncanny image. Glass-and-steel geometries spread across the floor and walls, while pedestrians, taxis, and trucks traversed the ceiling's beams. Never resolving into a coherent scene, the street's shifting forms demanded decelerated, sustained viewing.

In an adjacent room, five selections from Leonard's series of sun photographs (2011–12) imaged the solar surface in a spectrum of aquarelle grays. Nailed directly to the wall without protective glass, each print betrayed traces of process—grain, scratches, and other subtle imperfections—framed by the negative's black border. The pairing of these series produced two divergent visions of what photography can be: the first, durational and unfixed; the second, bound to paper and resolutely analog.
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Raising Spirits: Q+A with Massimiliano Gioni

Massimiliano Gioni toys with the art world. In 2002, together with artist Maurizio Cattelan and fellow curator Ali Subotnick, Gioni founded the Wrong Gallery: a space in New York's Chelsea district only three square feet, where, in his words, "nothing was for sale." Gioni's burlesque of the white cube garnered the art world's praise and led to prominent curatorial positions, including the directorship (along with Cattelan and Subotnick) of the critically lauded 2006 Berlin Biennale. Currently associate director and head of exhibitions at the New Museum, Gioni has mounted some of the venue's most conceptually rigorous shows, such as last year's survey of art from the Eastern bloc, "Ostalgia." In 2013, at age 40, he will serve as the youngest director in the Venice Biennial's over century-long history.
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Reality at the Core: Q+A with Barbara Kasten

Photography, conventionally conceived, is an outwardly oriented art, its content culled from the material world of people, places and things. But for the past four decades, Barbara Kasten has relentlessly turned her camera inwards, mounting a sustained meditation on the photograph's mechanics, the tracing of light striking a surface. Refusing the coherent world out there, Kasten creates abstractions rife with spatial ambiguity.

Trained as a painter, Kasten came to photography by way of the photogram. Her early series of "Photogenic Paintings" (1975) finds the artist arranging textured mesh atop light-sensitive paper and exposing the composition to light, creating surfaces that undulate in a spectrum of blues and grays.

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