Gregory Crewdson @ Gagosian Gallery
Gregory Crewdson’s latest body of work at the Gagosian Gallery continues to explore the poetics of small, suburban towns within America. Crewdson presents vast, panoramic tableaus of characters set within aesthetically stunning rural landscapes, crises-crossed by the indications of human’s industrial machinations: dilapidated trailer parks in the midst of lush, ethereal forests, overturned plastic children’s toys nestled in tall patches of grass, rusted bridge overpasses interrupting branches, snow-enveloped parking lots, tarnished, concrete dams forcing themselves on picturesque rushing rivers.
Within the new series, Crewdson distances his camera (both metaphorically and literally through composition and scope) from more psychologically dramatic and implausible character-driven stills, to pay homage to the traditional genre of landscape painting and photography. His works now reflect a more subtle orchestration of light, capturing the expansiveness of the terrain in an almost romantic investigation. Though still cinematic in focus, and dotted with his characteristic Edward-Hopper-esque internally lit windows, Crewdson prioritizes the manipulation of natural cycles of light. Like Monet investigating the atmospheric and symbolic implications of his haystacks portrayed within different temporal settings, Crewdson impressionistically staged his photographs over the course of four seasonal cycles from winter to summer.
Despite Crewdson’s less overtly theatrical tone, the photographs still manage to evoke his characteristic brand of tense, wondrously mysterious narratives and psychological dramas. Though his figures are largely blanketed and dwarfed by the intensity of an expanded landscape, in many ways, this choice evokes a more haunting descriptive. It is as if the all-encompassing quietude of the landscape further restrains the chaotic undertow of psychological kinetics, muting the unfolding lives like a heavy blanket, a foreign force at once muffling the character’s mental frenetics and whimpers of existentialist angst, all the while amplifying their sense of being alone. Though we are still voyeuristically implicated, as we peer through un-curtained windows and doors left ajar, we are less consumed, observing the scenes from a more lofty and omniscient perch, a panned-out perspective, from behind the glass window of the picture frame, safely at a distance.
Beautiful and haunting as they are, at their core, Crewdson’s photographs fundamentally comment on the way in which we have constructed our world. He visualizes the alienation caused by our isolationist vision; the atomism of our society estranging us both from one another and obscuring our basic needs as humans. We have built the bridges, the telephones, the business hours, the grind. It is in Crewdson’s subtly mundane gestures that the indescribable void of modern society is addressed. The orange bottle of pills placed casually on a nightstand, the glazed over eyes fixed on a distant point, or turned upwards in question, the car door left open. By situating this wild at heart, weird on top world within a naturally cyclical time scheme, Crewdson effectively exacerbates the sense that we alone are to blame for our discordantly dislodged relationship to everything around us. With the onset of Capitalism came a new understanding of time; one constructed not by aligning ourselves with the natural progression of things, but incongruously constructed by the ticking of clocks, the faux sunrise of alarms.
Crewdson’s Potemkin villages evoke the ethereally empty sensation of wiped out ghost towns, not unlike the abandoned society described in the 1971 science fiction film, “Omega Man.” Crewdson shows us a frozen, apocalyptic world of our own creation, moments before destruction, revolution, or both.