Entertainment · Books & Arts · 1 day ago
Deana Lawson exhibition examines surveillance, race and beauty
Photographer Deana Lawson’s exhibition “Edge Control” is on show at the Gagosian gallery in New York City.
It uses surveillance images of people accused of shoplifting from beauty supply stores, which often sell Black haircare products in Black neighborhoods.
Lawson enlarges the images and frames them with mirrors, so viewers see themselves looking at the people pictured.
Two holograms of Black women also shift as viewers move around them.
The exhibition connects surveillance with race, beauty and the power people have to decide what they are seeing.
Lawson does not present the people in the images as either criminals or heroes, and some faces remain hard to identify.
The exhibition asks viewers to question their assumptions about who is a customer and who is being treated as a suspect.
Deana Lawson’s exhibition Edge Control uses images of alleged beauty supply store shoplifters to explore race, beauty and surveillance.
The exhibition is at the Gagosian gallery in New York City.
Lawson enlarges the surveillance images and frames them with mirrors, making viewers see themselves looking at the subjects.
Two holograms in the gallery show Black women’s bodies changing with the viewer’s angle.
The exhibition examines who is watched and how perception operates amid unequal power relations.
- Who
- Artist Deana Lawson created the exhibition.
- What
- Edge Control uses images of alleged beauty supply store shoplifters to examine race, beauty and surveillance.
- When
- Not stated
- Where
- The Gagosian gallery in New York City.
- Why
- To explore the beauty industry, consumerism, surveillance and race, and how perception works amid unequal power relations.
This story does not have two clearly opposing sides.
interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see
foregrounds the implications of agency and transformative potential of beauty products within our late capitalist society
This story does not have a timeline yet.
- Artist
- Deana Lawson
- Exhibition
- Edge Control
- Venue
- Gagosian gallery, New York City
- Works
- Large-scale images of alleged beauty supply store shoplifters and two holograms of Black women’s bodies
Sources
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