The Allure of Plenty

The word copia is Latin for “abundance,” and Brian Ulrich’s show of that title explores the profusion of consumer goods in American (and in one case, British) retail outlets. Each of these 10 large-scale color photographs is set in the familiar confines of a middlebrow store: in supermarkets, toyshops, department stores, and shoe stores. The locations are so recognizable that your imagination begins to supply details excluded by the frame. Spend a few minutes among these lively images, and you will hear the neon lights buzzing overhead and feel the cheap tile beneath your feet.Mr. Ulrich’s aim is not simply documentary. He toys with perspective to accentuate meaning and creates witty narratives from the most banal of details. In one image, a puddle of spilled milk spreads across the floor in a peopleless supermarket corner where stacks of soft drinks come aggressively close to rows of milk cartons. In another shot, a back area of a department store, empty of products except for a single clothes rack, retains a look of healthy amplitude thanks to the ubiquitous posters announcing a liquidation sale.Everywhere you look in these photographs, there is abundance: shelves, rows, piles, aisles, pyramids, stacks, and display tables full of wine bottles, dresses, American flags, sneakers, dessert fondues, soda cans, and the list goes on. Mr. Ulrich’s take on this plenitude is mixed — half contempt, half wonder. As much as it seems that his project is meant to criticize a culture of material excess, the pictures cannot help but impress upon us the allure of plenty. In image after image, cacophony is compelling.The most common trope in the show concerns a sort of visual rapture. Three photographs depict a single consumer transfixed by the hypnotic appeal of a potential purchase: A boy stands mesmerized by an army of metal action figures; a young woman stares wide-eyed at a super market aisle packed with prepared foods; a man gazes at the fishing rod in his hand as if it were Excalibur. Like so much contemporary visual art, these photographs are ultimately lessons in the act of looking. While it is easy to mock the shoppers’ ecstasy, it is precisely this sort of enraptured sight that we hope to engage in each time we enter a gallery or museum — and yet rarely do.When an artist recognizes that the supermarket succeeds where the gallery does not, he can react with snobbism, irreverence, or curiosity. Mr. Ulrich adopts the latter stance. And this open-minded approach is why his images abound not only in material goods, but also complex emotions — envy and surprise, dismay and enthusiasm, disgust and delight.***Whereas Mr. Ulrich’s art is about splendid clutter, Richard Renaldi’s photographs celebrate the spare beauty of open space. His new show contains 18 large-scale color images, all set in the small towns and empty pastures of the American Great Plains.Most of these photographs are portraits, with the subject centered in iconic fashion before either a vertical backdrop — a truck, a wall — or a horizontal plane that fades into soft focus as it stretches into the distance. Images such as “Craig, Laughlin, Nevada” (2004), which shows a relaxed cowboy on a dusty field, or “Buba, Havre, Montana” (2006), a precociously world-weary preteen on a wide street, communicate sociological details about an area of the country that, spiritually at least, is about as far as you can travel in America from a Chelsea gallery. But for all of their descriptive empathy, these portraits seem haunted by the fantastic flatness of their hazy backgrounds, where extreme depth challenges the camera’s capacity to describe all that it sees.Such limitations are also apparent in the show’s few landscapes. “Thunder Basin, Wyoming” (2005) depicts a field with a bushy tree surrounded by an otherwise empty, tawny pasture. The picture seems simple enough until you notice tiny details in the background — grazing cattle, a wooden fence — and realize just how far back it recedes. Depth is hard to read on an empty plain, and these recognizable signs suggest a more distant horizon than one would originally have assumed.In “Road and Train, Hooker, Oklahoma” (2005), a dirt road stretches back from the foreground until it intersects the perpendicular line of a passing freight train — a momentary intrusion that blocks views of the horizon and frames the vista. A few seconds later, however, the train will have passed and the unbounded road will become an arrow pointing to the infinite space beyond the end of sight.Ulrich until February 10 (535 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-627-2410);Renaldi until March 3 (525 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-414-0370).

The Allure of Plenty

The Allure of Plenty

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