Gregory Crewdson
02 July - 04 September 2011
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GREGORY CREWDSON
In a Lonely Place
2 July - 4 September 2011
Anonymous American suburbs. There are homes strewn with garbage, streets
devoid of life, train tracks overgrown with weeds, and fallen-down
houses engulfed in flames. The traces of industrialization and
civilization appear as ruins. Nature has taken over—but these places are
neither idyllic nor romantic. People are shown almost impassively
stumbling through menacing landscapes without any sense of orientation.
They avoid meeting each other’s gazes, not reacting to this apocalyptic
speechlessness. Although no immediate violence can be seen, its presence
is palpable everywhere. Emptiness, loneliness, stasis, paranoia—the
elaborately staged photographs of Crewdson turn the darker sides of the
American dream inside out, enacting a fine line between normality and
horror.
In contrast to the classic thriller, Crewdson’s detailed tableaux from
the series Beneath the Roses depict people who are making no effort to
change anything, to defend themselves, or even to save their own lives.
Resigned to the mysteries of everyday life, they are left indifferent
and empty; they seem as if they are on automatic pilot. The hyperrealism
of these images makes the all-encompassing sense of alienation that
pervades them all the more vexing and disquieting. It unmasks the
middle-class American lifestyle and the typical suburban idyll as
hellish nightmares. Crewdson’s focus is not on social mobility but on
the spiritual abysses that are repressed from consciousness. In his
enigmatic photographs, the uncanny is neither new nor strange, but
familiar—as close as next door.
Crewdson’s large-format photographs are staged antinarratives. The
beginnings and endings of the stories lie outside the narrative frame,
leaving events in a permanent state of limbo, forever unresolved. Each
clue to the content leads to further questions. Embracing this broadly
conceived approach to the art of narrative, Crewdson carries on the
tradition of staged photography that emerged as one of the most
important forms of contemporary photographic expression since Cindy
Sherman and Jeff Wall. His work is also strongly influenced by the
visual cosmos of the Hollywood film, particularly the themes and imagery
of David Lynch and Steven Spielberg.
www.co-berlin.com
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