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Justine Kurland. (Reviews: New York).


GORNEY BRAVIN & LEE

Art-world cliques are mixed blessings. On the ascendant, a group of artists closely linked by medium, style, and subject, as well as by the institutions where they study and exhibit, can quickly gain an aesthetic cohesiveness harder for mavericks to establish. Once the clique has peaked, however, such identifications stale, propping up work that fails on its own terms and hampering new assessments even when the work succeeds. Justine Kurland's recent exhibition vaulted into the freshly intriguing category. So how to parse this project that owes much to, yet substantially transforms, its template?

In the five years since she received her MFA See multifactor authentication.  from the Yale photography program, Kurland's all-girl universe has been defined in relation to the careers of fellow alumnae Anna Gaskell, Dana Hoey, and Jenny Gage, all of whom pursue in various ways the theatrical, psychosexual psychosexual /psy·cho·sex·u·al/ (-sek´shoo-al) pertaining to the mental or emotional aspects of sex.

psy·cho·sex·u·al
adj.
Of or relating to the mental and emotional aspects of sexuality.
, advertising- and fashion-inflected tableaux favored by the program's den father, Gregory Crewdson. Infused with a blend of glamour and criticality, their pictures of mythically potent nymphets intimate an equivalence between the young women being photographed and those behind the camera--an enticing but uneasy symmetry summed up by Katy Siegel in these pages as "the new math of post feminism (hotness = self-empowerment)."

Kurland's technique--her dreamily intricate framing, crisp deep focus, and saturated color--has not changed, nor has her interest in the archetypes of all female societies. But with "In Community, Skyblue," 2001-2002, a series made while visiting back-to-the-land endaves in Virginia and California, Kurland's allegorical bent has a new kink. The artist maintains the atmosphere of erotic camaraderie and lilting corruption while refining the terms under which beauty and authority entwine. Most important, she has stopped photographing only teenagers.

Men and children appear in a suite of C-prints and a smaller set of silver gelatin gelatin or animal jelly, foodstuff obtained from connective tissue (found in hoofs, bones, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage) of vertebrate animals by the action of boiling water or dilute acid.  prints taken on the communes, an acknowledgment of family affiliations and sexual maturity previously banished from Kurland's scenes. The sylvan sylvan

emanating from or pertaining to woods. See also sylvatic.
 color shots are populated by squads of adult women, mostly nude, engaged in garden chores: weeding, watering, gathering produce or flowers, cutting brush. Romantic rural idyll idyll
 or idyl

In literature, a simple descriptive work in poetry or prose that deals with rustic life or pastoral scenes or suggests a mood of peace and contentment.
 holds sway, and Kurland's attunement Attunement is a process, similar to synchronization, wherein previously diffuse systems come into alignment, often spontaneously. It is distinct from synchronized dancing, swimming, or other human aesthetic activities that are preplanned, practiced and then performed.  to landscape persists. Mists and sunlight, leaves and petals hang poised in Edenic clarity, and compositions such as Cattails and Swamp Fronds and Red Zinnia zinnia, any species of the genus Zinnia of the family Asteraceae (aster family), native chiefly to Mexico, though some range as far north as Colorado and as far south as Guatemala. The common zinnia of gardens (Z. , both 2001, project a friezelike, still-unravished-bride-of-quietness gravitas grav·i·tas  
n.
1. Substance; weightiness: a frivolous biography that lacks the gravitas of its subject.

2.
, the women's pearly skin contrasting with but unalienated from encroaching verdure. The classicizing slant is torqued, however, by the strenuous labor being performed and by the homeyness of the women's bodies. Haphazard ponytails and drooping droop  
v. drooped, droop·ing, droops

v.intr.
1. To bend or hang downward: "His mouth drooped sadly, pulled down, no doubt, by the plump weight of his jowls" 
 breasts abound. Babies crawl underfoot. These are not unravished brides, and they seem happy with that (one of them is, in fact, Kurland's mother).

Kurland persuaded her subjects to pose nude, and "performance" is a key concept here. But, unlike the gangs of girls once cast by the photographer, these people actually do live together, and the daily grind of utopia differs profoundly from its temporary setup as a photo shoot. When Kurland departs, her subjects will presumably pre·sum·a·ble  
adj.
That can be presumed or taken for granted; reasonable as a supposition: presumable causes of the disaster.
 keep doing what she shows them doing, albeit clothed. Acknowledging this fact, Kurland's silver prints portray the hippie farmers dressed and posed in loose ranks with their kids. If the C-prints contain as much rollicking rol·lick·ing  
adj.
Carefree and high-spirited; boisterous: a rollicking celebration.



rol
 Brueghel as serene Poussin, the black-and-whites are like Farm Service Agency documents produced by some groovy new-millennium shadow government. Kurland's photographic fantasy has shifted from the creation of a pretend community to participation in an extant one. The artist begins to distance herself from the Yale contingent with a nuanced blending of documentary and the wish--here temporarily fulfilled--for an ur-community of benevolent amazons. All to the good, b ecause beauty may be truth and truth beauty, but desire is a riddle, and only complicated answers help.
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Author:Richard, Frances
Publication:Artforum International
Geographic Code:1USA
Date:Nov 1, 2002
Words:612
Previous Article:Eija-Liisa Ahtila. (Reviews).
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