Modernism West Gallery-Current Exhibition
Lindsay McCrum
Obscure Beauty – Shadows & Tracings
Show begins June 6th at MODERNISM WEST, 2534 Mission Street
Lindsay McCrum’s “Obscure Beauty: Shadows & Tracings” is a series of images, styled and lit cinematically that examines contemporary representations of beauty linked to fashion, glamour, and celebrity. Haunting and enchanted scenes, although designed and orchestrated, somehow seem improvised and unexpected. But the subjects in these photographs are not real. Rather, they are dolls dressed and posed dynamically much like human portraits and presented frozen in time and space as if in movie stills.
In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche) Sigmund Freud describes the disquieting psychological experience of encountering dolls that appear too human and are presented in unexpected environments. These are feelings, Freud writes, of things that are “strangely familiar.” The images in Obscure Beauty: Shadows & Tracings are just as evocative, capturing the unsettling quality of these inanimate representations of actual beauty.
