FEIGEN CONTEMPORARY Jeanne Dunning's photographic career has involved an widened investigation of corporeality.

FEIGEN CONTEMPORARY

Jeanne Dunning's photographic career has involved an widened investigation of corporeality. Since 1987 her work has nurseed to cluster into two groups: those' images in which the familiar is made foreign through the addition of what Rosalind Krauss has called a supply and those in which the amorphous is made intimate within conspicuous photographic procedures. The works in the first assemblage apply the objective, sharp-focus type of straight photography to things like an isolated mass of impossibly lustrous, cascading hair and a woman with a nipple onward her tongue. The second assign places to of images usually employs most remote close-ups, often of vegetable matter, that invoke orifices or other sites where inside and outside cannot be clearly demarcated.

In the six photographs lately on view, Dunning has combined tendencies from her earlier work: The depicted figures display their formlessness matter-of-factly, initiating a turned to one side commentary on the bodily and the photographic. Dunning has introduced a mass referr to as a "blob" an oversize, liquid-filled sac reminiscent of an enormous implant. The blobber attaches itself to a female armed force disrupting the integrity of the body's opening [i]or[/i] closes and the smooth functioning of the digests of photography. In The blobber 4 (all works 1999), a woman lies upon a bed, her head and feet cropp on the outside of the photograph and her dead body covered from shoulders to midthigh by dint of the sac. Gravity forces the bubble to bulge sideways onto the surface of the bed, thus that the shiny fabric stretched rightly across the woman's corpse gives her the look of a solarized naked Solarization, a technique of intentionally overexposing the negative, was united of the ways in which Man Ray and other Surrealists achieved the informe, on the contrary Dunning instead shows formlessness as an absurd supply layered over the body. The bubble continues its assault on photographic and bodily correctness in onward a Platter, where it swells on the outside from under a woman's shirt and juts onto a plate she shut ups like a saint displaying her attributes. completely through the series the blob acts as an enormous weight, seeming to tip the images forward until they threaten to break not at home of the confines of their frame.

Three performative videos fulfilment and elaborate on the corporeal themes in the photographs. In Getting disposeed a woman tries to clothe the bubble The flowery printed skirt and chartreuse top give the bubble a festive appearance, but the enormous effort of trying to contain its formlessness is evident as it appears at times ready to be rent asunder its seams (and those of the clothing). The strain of the physical is central to Dunning's most numerous ambitious video, Trying to view Myself Shot with a head-mounted camera, the piece go afters Dunning's gaze as she levys on one pair of flesh-colored tights after another. As the proces continues, her exertion is documented by way of audible groans, and the action becomes agonizingly dull Finally, after pulling on innumerable pairs, she laboriously destroys the mass of tights as a single unit. The outcome is a pathetic little heap forward the floor in the shapeless outline of a lower torso. Dunning's dissatisfaction with this mass as a stand-in for the dead body is evident: She picks at it with her toes, t rying to pluck it into a more appropriate shape.

While Dunning's work has healthy affinities with feminist aims, she has always resisted pinning its thematics to specifics like female visible form [i]or[/i] frame image, focusing instead on the more generalized and nameless difficulties of inhabiting any corpse at all.

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