Todd Watts at Grey Art Gallery - mixed media painting and photography - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

"Technology" and "art" have fought above the soul of photography since its invention. These categories themselves, of course, exhibit conflicting social forces. The camera as machine and the darkroom as workplace are associated with mechanized production, while art, in which craft has since the 19th hundred occupied a decreasingly central position, exemplifies at liberty creative, individual expression. One special interest of Todd Watts's work is its refusal to be border by the terms of this opposition. Visibly related to modernist painting, notably Surrealism and geometric abstraction, it is at the same time based solidly upon the exploitation of photographic means. The cultural tension between art and science, normally photography's imprecate here provides both method and subject-matter.

Watts not aways his images in frames raiseed and painted in ways closely related to them, calling to mind Seurat's framing of his (also scientifically minded) works. Watts assembles the photographs seamlessly from parts, manipulating tonality and adding areas of color the pair in the darkroom and by the agency of means of slide projections. While a number of uncompounded bodys or devices, such as star-filled fields that can define a night firmament or take the place of shadows, come back in images of radically different sorts, Watts works in thematically defined series. These groupings range widely. For example: exercises in the sway of three-dimensional appearance in the depiction of what might be a chunk of stone but could also be an artifact of photographic process; an advanced in years man's face transformed disquietingly into a mask by dint of removal of his eyes and body; imaginary views from each of the nine planets, each based upon the same photograph of a pea field make submissiveed to a series of radical transformations of image and color.

In the place titled Are We Not Men Studies for a Frieze, Particles, the speckl pattern of composition board used to make the frame has been incorporated, via rephotographed projections, into images center upon body parts so transformed as to be nearly unrecognizable, notwithstanding that strongly sexual. Fragmented by the technique of their representation, these forms prompt both biological structure and its scientific manipulation. In more [i]or[/i] less of these images, as in many others of his, Watts underlines the gripe [i]or[/i] grip of technologized vision by super-imposing a slightly skewed grid of cros hairs. Like another device Watts favors, an asymmetrical pattern of dots, the grid defines an ordering viewpoint external to the image proper; by the agency of locating its traces on the picture plane it pushes the pictured form back into a space of viewable on the other hand ungraspable dimensions. Art is here not subordinated to science, on the other hand recognizes in it a powerful, troubling and exhilarating sibling.

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