On View...at the Met: Jesse Krimes
Notes on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in June, part 1.
Last weekend, our editor Alexandra went to see what was happening on the upper east side and never made it out of the Met. This week, she’s telling you about the five shows that kept her there.
On view: Jesse Krimes
Jesse Krimes: Corrections, on view until July 13, presents work created during the artist’s incarceration. Hanging on a wall in the room’s center is a 15’’ x 40’’ quilt of thin cotton sheets, which we learn from the wall text is prison-issued bedding. From 2010 to 2013, Krimes took articles from the New York Times and transferred inky images onto the white bedsheets, leaving colorful traces of the newspaper’s photographs. The Times was a major source of news for him when he was cut off from much of the outside world. While reading, he noticed a “misalignment between journalistic narratives and the symbolism in accompanying photographs”—he was alarmed at how drastically different images could be from page to page. The mural (named after both a Greek word meaning “to bring to light,” which is the root of the English “apocolypse,” and Krimes’ own prison number) is intentionally filled with contradictory Hieronymus Bosch-esque images: scenes of horror and human suffering placed next to idyllic resort vacation destinations or smiling women in advertisements.
Nearby, images of people convicted or suspected of a crime are treated as another kind of spectacle. Mugshots from Paris in the 1800s (policeman Alphonse Bertillon is credited with the invention of this kind of sociological documentation in the late nineteenth century) are on display. These photographs would run in French newspapers as ways of naming, shaming, and possibly locating suspects, and the exhibit includes them to make an effort in contextualizing photography’s historical role in incarceration.
It’s a welcome coincidence that Krimes’ work can be experienced in connection with artist Lorna Simpson’s, who has her own exhibit on view in a gallery just downstairs (more on Simpson later this week). Collage and image transfer are used by both artists, with each finding newspapers and ads as source material. Their collages appear to be an attempt to reference the real, inhabited world while escaping to a new one, whether a Bosch-like space of heaven and hell or an ice-filled, inky-blue tundra.
later this week:
The Three Perfections. Through August 3.
Sargent and Paris. Through August 3.
also on view in the city:
Joiri Minaya, Geographic Bodies, at the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. Through June 14.
Ching Ho Cheng, Tracing Infinity, at Bank. Through June 14.
Yu Nishimura, Clearing Unfolds, at David Zwirner. Through June 27.
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