Stephen Shore reviewed in esse

Despite my best efforts to say “no” to any writing jobs that are not my dissertation in 2013–14, there are sometimes exhibitions that still catch me off-guard and are so memorable, or perplexing, that it seems I can’t not write about them. That’s how it felt when I trekked to Mayfair to see Stephen Shore’s latest solo show at Sprüth Magers last fall while I was living in London. I’ve long admired the American photographer’s talent for making banal urban spaces into playful studies of formal juxtaposition, but what surprised me about “Something + Nothing” was the artist’s display strategies, which saw him break up previously discrete bodies of work and arrange individual photographs into clusters based on taxonomical similarities. Images of car dashboards, pedestrians walking or sprinting across streets, plates of food and architectural studies each had their own section in the gallery, giving an eccentric, encyclopedic overview of Shore’s work over the past four decades.

Montreal’s esse magazine kindly let me review the show in their latest issue, which is on newsstands now.

And now, back to the dissertation writing. See you in a few months.