Objects at Hand — Daniel Gordon

The photographs in Objects at Hand mark a departure within Gordon's practice. The artist began his recent Light Study series working exclusively in black and white – a first in his two-decade career. Stripped of the saturated color for which he is known, the photographs foreground shadow, surface, and sculptural form. They are more tightly cropped than his previous images, intimate in scale, their attention trained on the objects immediately surrounding him: glasses, kitchenware, stationery, combs, scissors. Arranged into precisely lit tableaux at once spare and visually intricate, these compositions carry the formal echoes of canonical modernist photography – the geometries and tonal precision of Edward Weston's shells and peppers, the playful object arrangements of André Kertész, the surrealist dislocations of Man Ray. Gordon's work also finds kinship with a lineage of contemporary photographic construction that stretches from Jan Groover's formalist kitchen still lifes of the 1970s through Barbara Kasten's studies of perception and geometric illusion.