Word: shermans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Moving from these small black and white photos, one is startled by the large, horizontal, color "centerfold" images which make up makeup Sherman's next series of pieces. Commissioned and then rejected by Vanity Fair, these photos picture the artist crouched on the floor or on a bed in various costumes and wigs. In all the images, her characters express fear, alienation and helplessness. Some accuse Sherman of reinforcing negative female stereotypes, but she resolutely denies the charge. She wants, she says, merely "to make people uncomfortable in their expectations of seeing cleavage...
CLIMBING THE stairs to the second floor of the exhibit, the viewer is confronted by 10 "costume dramas," enormous, eight-foot tall color fashion photos. From the rosy-checked all-American girl to the angry looking woman with the blonde hair in her face, Sherman has perfected what she calls the look of "anti-glamour." Many of these works were commissioned by Paris fashion designers, and Sherman's seems to have deliberately tried to make herself look ugly in their glamorous clothes...
This floor of the exhibit is dominated by bizarre and grotesque "fairy-tale scenes" in which Sherman creates her fullest narratives, single images which bring forth a dream or fantasy. These disturbing images feature Sherman as a variety of different characters, including an Arabian prince, a deformed pig-like beast and a drowned corpse. Set in an eerie and frightening landscape of rocks and gel lighting, these fairy tales jump from Sherman's imagination into...
...past year, Sherman has begun to lessen her presence in her work. Her new subject is food. One piece, which she privately calls "Bulimia at the Beach," depicts a repulsive mixture of vegetable soup and crushed cupcakes. Sherman appears only in a reflection in the mirrored sunglasses on the sand. In her most recent photographs, Sherman is completely absent from the tableau. She has surrendered her "canvas" entirely to a mixture of hotdogs and wind-up toys in one, and a mask full of decayed dog food in another...
...disturbing are these images for Sherman, images which often depict her own death? "I kind of like them," she says. "The grosser they are, the more I'm entertained by them. Sherman doesn't understand post-modern, feminist and semiotic analyses of her work and avoids over-intellectualizing her work. She says she simply wants to "shake people up, to make them really think about wanting to own a work...