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A common expectation for works of art is that they inject vibrancy and life into inert material. Amy Adler's art goes the other way, however, and that turns out to be not necessarily a bad thing. In a somewhat mixed Focus Series exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the bloodless morbidity of her best photographs is positively unnerving.
The show includes 11 works (some feature groups of between three and eight photographs), most made in 1996 and 1997 by the 32-year-old L.A.-based artist. The earliest is a single image titled "After Sherrie Levine," which announces a fundamental source for Adler's artistic trajectory.
Sherrie Levine is a New York-based artist who gained initial prominence in the 1980s by taking pictures of existing photographs made by other artists--mostly pictures that reside in the public domain. Her reproductions questioned such traditional artistic values as authenticity and originality. She threw a feminist monkey wrench into presumptions that men are originators while women reproduce.
Adler's "After Sherrie Levine" is based on Levine's photograph of a classic Edward Weston photograph showing the nude torso of his young son. The difference is this: Rather than photograph Weston's photograph, as Levine did, Adler made a pencil drawing of the Weston (or perhaps Levine's copy of the Weston), thus inserting the individual hand of the artist into the sequence of borrowings. Then, she photographed her drawing, which was subsequently destroyed.
The end result is a singular...