With tonight's show just a few hours away from opening, all of us over at Jen Bekman Projects HQ are nervous and (very) excited about seeing the text-filled bounty of Summer Reading up on the gallery walls. Yesterday evening, Raul and I stopped by at the gallery during installation and had the chance to see the works as they were making their way into place, and one in particular caught my eye.

This is an image I've seen many times on the web, but never in person, and seeing it framed and ready for the show was a real treat. The image I'm talking about is Brian Ulrich's Powerhouse Gym, also the opening image on his website, which is one of many images that are part of projects confronting American consumerism and retail. His projects Thrift, Retail, and Backrooms all look at stores, malls, and shoppers from the inside out, and his latest series, Stores That Are No More, shot for Time is well within this theme, capturing big box stores that are now empty as a product of the current recession.

Images of the recession were a common motif among Hey, Hot Shot! contenders this year, and we suspect we'll see more along these lines during the next (and soon upcoming) round of competition. Nobody has captured these times of economic hardship quite like Ulrich though, and much attention has been called to this series on the web. Recently, Todd Walker of Gallery Hopper wrote about Ulrich in a blog post:

If there is a single photographer who has summed up the current Great Recession and its causes, it's Brian Ulrich. Some photographers are gifted with a fortuitous choice of subject matter and great timing. Brian's work on "Copia", meditations on consumerism and its consequences is great work on its own, but its wider exhibition benefits from being in a particular time and place. "Dark Stores" documents the leave-behinds of failed big box retailers. "Thrift" the lifecycle of discarded clothes and other goods that end up in thrift store economy.

The falsely positive message of "Yes" that clings to the dark and empty workout center in the image Powerhouse Gym is another instance of Ulrich finding the perfect intersection in choice of subject matter and timing. It screams bloody red encouragement on one hand, in one of the most basic and first-spoken words anyone says in the English language, but in it's lonely position in front of an empty gym also reflects that anything, may not in fact, be possible.

For now, however, we depart the world of empty storefronts to see the fiery red "Yes" of Ulrich's Powerhouse Gym in another context -- surrounded by the company of text-inspired art that is motivating, hilarious, welcoming and romantic -- at the gallery tonight from 6-8 p.m.