Nancy Davenport at Nicole Klagsbrun - New York - photography exhibition - Brief Article

New York City is home to any number of bland, white-brick apartment buildings, distantly derived from Bauhaus idealism, which evoke the safety and ease of routine middle-class life in a city of plenty. Nancy Davenport's new series of C-prints, "The Apartments," seems to consist of documentary photographs of just such forgettable buildings, but with a startling twist: they're all under terrorist attack, whether it's a missile streaking in from the left, masked figures scaling the facade or a conflagration erupting from a room on an upper floor. Davenport digitally combined photographs of these buildings with others, taken in the studio, of her friends in terrorist garb and poses. Thus, in Revolutionary (Day), 2001, you see tiny Ninja-like "terrorists" rappelling on ropes, clambering over balconies and raising a red flag, while in Untitled (Terrorist #1), 2001, a figure on a balcony wearing a hood and shorts seems to be standing with nowhere to go.

Many of Davenport's building takeovers and sieges directly refer to, indeed reenact, famous events of the past, such as the Palestinian attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics or the Kent State protests, but now the ideological content of these actions seems stripped away: you don't know who is protesting what, what the cause is or was. Throughout, Davenport, who uses digital-era techniques to disrupt the presumed veracity of documentary photographs, contrasts these banal contemporary apartment buildings with the upheavals and fierce ideologies of the 1960s and early `70s. Further fleshing out this collision of eras are a streaker, now presumably fleeing some unseen calamity, and several references to body-based performance art.

Davenport's show opened on Sept. 6. Then came the events of Sept. 11, which starkly recontextualized these photographs in ways that are unsettling for the viewer and no doubt staggering for the artist. Suddenly, Davenport's doctored photographs of a missile striking an apartment complex while a dark explosion looms in the background, or of a 747 flying overhead while a lone man shoots a pistol at it (a reference to a 1973 performance by Chris Burden) don't seem humorous at all, nor culturally critical, but instead eerily prescient and raw. Now when you see a man standing on a balcony with upraised arms while dirty smoke pours from a window behind him, you can't help but think of terrified people waving frantically from the top floors of the World Trade Center. The remarkable thing is how Davenport's brainy investigation of failed idealism suddenly swerves into an ultra-conflicted present, not because of anything she has done, but because the world has shifted. Her fake documentary photographs, for better or worse, now seem so real that they wound.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group