Dietmar Busse: Fairytales 1991–1999 / Jenna Bliss: Basic Cable / Loretta Fahrenholz: A Coin from Thin Air

Amant’s fall program centers on solo exhibitions by Jenna Bliss, Dietmar Busse, and Loretta Fahrenholz. Ranging across a variety of lens-based media, Dietmar Busse: Fairytales 1991–1999, Jenna Bliss: Basic Cable, and Loretta Fahrenholz: A Coin from Thin Air reflect shifting media formats, the ways they are employed, and their impact on society at large. With images circulated and consumed at an ever-increasing pace since the 1990s, the site of their production has become imbued with intensified anxieties, dreams, and compulsions. Unfolding across Amant’s three gallery spaces, these exhibitions together portray the sociopolitical dimensions, conditions of survival, visual aesthetics, and conceptual frameworks for image-making across the past four decades.  

Fairytales 1991–1999 is New York-based artist Dietmar Busse’s first institutional exhibition in the US. The photographic essay laid out at Amant relays the explorative journeys the artist conducted shortly after arriving from Spain and traveling—predominantly by bike—from Brighton Beach via the Chelsea piers and Bryant Park to the Upper East Side and Harlem. En route from one place to another, on the street, at fashion shoots, or in domestic settings, Dietmar shot his Polaroids on the fly and in duplicate, leaving one copy with the portrayed figures and the other in his pocket. Produced during the 1990s and presented here for the first time, this timeless oeuvre includes idiosyncratic portraits of Amy Wesson, Kara Walker, Pedro Almodóvar, Philip Johnson, Rossy de Palma, and Steve McQueen. Quiet, intimate, and emotional, Fairytales 1991–1999 captures the atmosphere of a bygone New York era. 

Not unlike Dietmar’s early Polaroids, Jenna Bliss’s photomontages, ready-mades, and Super 8mm films evoke the sensations of the agent observateur. Her work engages the urban landscape of New York City to stage broader questions about local and global finance, politics, and aesthetics. Jenna intertwines meticulous research and associative image-making to create a body of work informed by experiences both personal and collective. Installed at 306 Maujer, Basic Cable gathers a series of found light boxes overlayed with film stills; short video works of superimposed Super 8mm footage; and a 30-minute film titled True Entertainment (2023), which follows the fictional artist Lola Van Haas and her gallery at a prestigious art fair in the lead up to the 2008 economic crisis. The works allude simultaneously to the economic and technological infrastructures that surround us and to the ideological matrix that runs below the city. 

Loretta Fahrenholz’s exhibition A Coin from Thin Air explores human and technological value creation and self-actualization. Loretta’s latest film, Trash The Musical (2023), was produced in collaboration with LA-based performance artist Alicia McDaid. From a distance, Alicia provided Loretta with footage of herself cleaning out her aging uncle’s Philadelphia home while simultaneously producing scandalous, absurdist, and exaggeratedly diaristic performances for social media. With Alicia’s churning production of data paralleled in the piles of analogue material collected by her uncle, including decades’ worth of paintings and self-help books, the film places the virtual and the real in swirling juxtaposition. Alongside the film, Amant’s 932 Grand gallery hosts an installation of Loretta’s images of picnics made with early text-to-image AI and mushroom-shaped lamps representing decades of replicatory interior design, as well as photographs of German Baroque court society reenactors and architectural scans taken at a psychiatric hospital. Together, this assemblage of overlapping references and layers of artifice traces technology’s often delirious ideological and visceral implications through the realm of a social imaginary.