Milwaukee, WI
6/2/13 1:45 PM
Jason Altobelli has chosen one of a number of possible answers to the dilemma that faces many a contemporary photographer: how to deal with the easy proliferation of images that flood our visual world and have made the work of professional photographers seem redundant. Rather than go the route of producing virtuosic individual pictures, Altobelli has decided to edit idiosyncratic series of banal images in the hopes that they will together add up to something extraordinary. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. The best works in his “Sequences Collection” string along pictures of different sizes and without overt interconnections. The combinations don’t feel random but rather subtle and multifaceted, allowing the viewer to puzzle her own way through the relationships of form and content that might exist between a dirty mound of snow, a bike rack and a web of hairy filaments. Other works, by contrast, have too much in common, both among themselves and with their programmatic titles, thereby closing down on interpretation rather than opening it up.
—Lori Waxman