Life would be tough going, even if people did not put so many obstacles in their own way. One could try to clear them out by, say, spending less time alone with devices, viewing nonsense like mine. Sandi Haber Fifield delights in them—the ones she observes and the ones she creates in photocollage.
A barrier for her can stand in the way of knowing others, like the shadowy figures in her work. Yet it is simply part of life. It is the visual equivalent of memory, at Yancey Richardson through February 17.
Nature presents obstacles enough, from stony landscapes to dense undergrowth, and Haber Fifield brings them into sharp focus. The accumulated fragments in her collage create their own depth of field as well, layer upon layer. Her point of view shifts easily between face down and face front. One can feel oneself approaching things to push them aside. One can feel oneself, too, stepping back to find one’s footing. Her considerable white space may or may not help.
That is not to mention the built environment. Not that she necessarily distinguishes it from nature, no more than James Welling or John Houck—and I work this together with last week’s report on Welling and an upcoming one on Houck as a longer review and my latest upload. Potted plants with bare branches stand just outside a garage because her cuts place them there, but they could just as easily have grown there or landed there as home decor. A work crew must have piled those irregular gray stones. A man stands face to face with an entire wall of vegetation. Like the plants and stones, he may never find his way inside.
Much else, too, has no sense of home, only of barriers. That includes the one-piece plastic fencing that people love to hate—on top of her own thin strips of wood. A police cone has acquired colorful stripes and presides over torn branches in full leaf, like a memorial or celebration. If that suggests a death or absence, so do the silhouettes of boys at the beach. Do not, though, lose hope, for they are taking a break from exertion, and flowers, too, appear in silhouette. They are, the show’s title has it, “The Thing in Front of You,” and that is not the same as the thing in itself.
Mark Alice Durant, in the show’s catalogue, compares her attention to that of a well-known painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the epitome of Northern Romanticism. A man stands on a rock, back to the viewer, looking out on distant mountains and foggy seas. Still, Haber Fifield (no relation to me) is not so much commanding as creating, and the layers keep coming, defying distance. 
Brutalist architecture comes at you corner on, one side in shadow. Her angled cuts echo the building’s edge and her edge-on point of view. Once again, obstacles are just another word for experience.
Covid-19 brought its share of barriers to entry, but it gave her time, she says, to think. For the rest of us, what was there to do but take up knitting? And what was there to do after the lockdown but pick up the camera and get going? It may sound like a cliché, but Rachel Perry, at the same gallery, did both. She has not fallen for female stereotypes, but she makes the most of them. They become a window onto her studio.
Knitting for her is not folk art but Minimalism. And Minimalism, in turn, takes shape from the business of art in the present. Perry broke down cardboard boxes, delighting in the odd shapes that others would take to the trash. She also photographs herself with her work, in a floor-length dress of many colors, in diagonal stripes. She also keeps finding ways to hide her face, with her back to the camera or a mirror between her and you. Barriers take many forms, and they belong to artists that you may never see.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.