Meredith Allen Untitled_0460 digital C-print 18.25" x 18.25"

Meredith Allen Untitled_0420 digital C-print 18.25" x 18.25"

Meredith Allen Untitled_0538 digital C-print 18.25" x 18.25"

Meredith Allen Untitled_0462 digital C-print 18.25" x 18.25"

While I've known Meredith Allen for years, I've been following her documentary and art photography even longer. With each of the regular appearance of new bodies of very strong work, Allen has been able to open up the culture and the aesthetic of worlds most of us encounter regularly but would take pretty much for granted without the fact and the quality of her interventions.

Her latest series, "Trash", is very handsomely installed on the walls of the Edward Thorp Gallery on Eleventh Avenue for the rest of this week. The smart, whimsical and sometimes borderline-sad humor which was always a large part of Allen's earlier work is mostly gone in these modest-size, square photographs of filled and tied recycling bags. Instead there's a new, almost monumental aspect to these images, its solemn potential confounded probably just in time, in fact balanced perfectly, by the squashiness and ephemeral nature of the subjects, and also the delicate, yes, totally honest prettiness of the artist's captures.

I love every one of them, and I'm finding I didn't really need the jpegs near me to still see them in my head two days later.

[images from the artist]