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| Gregory Crewdson - The Motel, 2014 |
This is the first UK exhibition of
Cathedral of the Pines, a
new body of work by acclaimed American artist Gregory Crewdson, and it
is also the first time
The Photographers’ Gallery has devoted all three
of its gallery spaces to one artist.
With this series, produced between 2013 and 2014, Crewdson departs
from his interest in uncanny suburban subjects and explores human
relations within more natural environments. In images that recall
nineteenth-century American and European paintings, Crewdson photographs
figures posing within the small rural town of Becket, Massachusetts,
and its vast surrounding forests, including the actual trail from which
the series takes its title. Interior scenes charged with ambiguous
narratives probe tensions between human connection and separation,
intimacy and isolation.
Crewdson describes this project as ‘his
most personal’, venturing to retrieve in the remote setting of the
forest, a reminiscence of his childhood. The images in
Cathedral of the Pines,
located in the dystopian landscape of the anxious American imagination,
create atmospheric scenes, many featuring local residents, and for the
first time in Crewdson’s work, friends and family. In
Woman at Sink, a woman pauses from her domestic chores, lost in thought. In
Pickup Truck,
Crewdson shows a nude couple in the flatbed of a truck in a dense
forest—the woman seated, the man turned away in repose. Crewdson
situates his disconsolate subjects in familiar settings, yet their
cryptic actions—standing still in the snow, or nude on a riverbank—hint
at invisible challenges. Precisely what these challenges are, and what
fate awaits these anonymous figures, are left to the viewer's
imagination.
Crewdson's careful crafting of visual suspense
conjures forebears such as Diane Arbus, Alfred Hitchcock, and Edward
Hopper, as well as the influence of Hollywood cinema and directors such
as David Lynch.
In Cathedral of the Pines, Crewdson's persistent psychological leitmotifs evolve into intimate figurative dramas.
Visually
alluring and often deeply disquieting, these tableaux are the result of
an intricate production process: For more than twenty years, Crewdson
has used the streets and interiors of small-town America as settings for
photographic incarnations of the uncanny. Working with a large crew, he
plans his images as meticulously as any movie director.
The exhibition opened June 23 and runs until October 8.
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| Gregory Crewdson - The Haircut, 2014 |
