Holly Wright, “Final Portrait: Vivian and Bob Folkenflik” (1983) (all photos courtesy the Fralin Museum of Artwork until in any other case famous)
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia — “Vanity” is a type of phrases freighted with cultural baggage, from the Bible (“all is vanity”) to philosophy (“Vanity is the fear of appearing original,” per Nietzsche) to literature (Ezra Pound’s “Pull down thy vanity”). At an exhibition of pictures by Holly Wright on the Fralin Museum of Artwork, the phrase takes on connotations from “vain” to “vanitas.”
Holly Wright: Vainness opens with the titular collection of pictures, 10 close-ups of the artist’s fingers from 1985 to ’88. Is it useless to {photograph} one’s fingers? Maybe, however with no close by wall textual content, you is likely to be hard-pressed to make out precisely what a part of the physique you’re taking a look at. Utilizing varied blurring results, Wright highlights creases, cracks, and folds, reworking them into fleshy abstractions. These will be considerably unsettling. A picture of 4 fingernails seemingly pressed into pores and skin, as an example, is likely to be learn as tooth. Two pictures subtitled “Black Hole” characteristic deep wells of darkness inside the tight universe of the hand.
Within the 1993 collection Poetry, Wright affords contact sheet-like preparations of pictures of the mouth of her husband, Charles Wright, in mid-recitation. In these close-ups, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States Poet Laureate is decreased to, nicely, a mouthpiece, his lips, generally in partial shadow, forming phrases we can’t hear. Though these stop-action takes will be fascinating, these works definitely “pull down [his] vanity.”
Holly Wright, “Untitled” (1985–88), silver gelatin print, 21¼ x 28½ inches (~54 x 72.4 cm)
The poet additionally appeared in one other Wright collection, True Saints (1980–84), which options portraits of family and friends enjoying the components of biblical figures. “My particular interest,” the artist as soon as stated of those enactments, “is role-playing and self-images, what is real and what is authentic faking.”
This makes for a pleasant segue to the third collection within the present, Closing Portraits (1980–1983). For these full-length research, Wright requested her topics to contemplate how they may greet loss of life — how they might look, what they might put on, and many others. In “Vivian and Bob Folkenflik” (1983) the eponymous couple lies facet by facet, loosely holding fingers, prepared to satisfy their maker with what seems to be open-eyed steadfastness. The small print pull you in: her sandals, his wrinkled-at-the-knees pants, the leaf sample of the sheet upon which they lie. For his earthly finale, the Wrights’ son, Luke, selected to arm himself with rifle, hatchet, and knife, his small physique stretched out on the bottom in a chilling vanitas picture of loss of life amidst life.
Holly Wright, “Untitled” (1993), silver gelatin print, 24 x 20 inches (~61 x 50.8 cm) (photograph Carl Little/Hyperallergic)
Holly Wright, “Final Portrait: Luke Wright” (1982), 64 x 32 inches (~162.6 x 81.3 cm)
Holly Wright: Vainness continues on the Fralin Museum of Artwork by January 5, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Hannah Cattarin and M. Jordan Love.
