Gregory Crewdson
RED STAR EXPRESS, 2018 from “An Eclipse of Moths”
50 x 88.9 inches
Digital pigment print
ROYAL CLEANERS, 2018-19 from “An Eclipse of Moths”
50 x 88.9 inches
Digital pigment print
“Eclipse” is the collective noun for a group moths, an appropriate choice since moths gather around and consequently blot out light. “An Eclipse of Moths” is also the title of this new body of work by world-renowned photographer Gregory Crewdson.
Since the late 1980s, Crewdson has used photographic mises-en-scène to explore themes of alienation, and dislocation within American culture. His surreal images are often melancholic, offering ambiguous narratives that blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. Working with large production teams to scout and shoot his images, his photographs have become increasingly complex as if they were a motion picture production, requiring dozens of assistants, Hollywood-style lighting, and specially crafted stage sets.
Meticulously staged scenes like those in “Eclipse of Moths” undercut the bucolic and pastoral aesthetics of middle-class American with an ominous sense of foreboding. Crewdson’s large-scale photographs drop the viewer into the middle of an unfolding but opaque narrative, leaving them to fill in the details, like a detective searching for clues to a crime. Tinworks is pleased to present two works from this new series, Red Star Express and Royal Cleaners. While these complex and evocative images were created in 2018 and 2019, they are eerily appropriate to our new socially distant way of life. Figures sit or stand far away from one another and far away from narrative events, charging the space between them with mystery. In all of the images, the earth is damp from a recent rainfall. Steam rises from the hot, wetted ground as it cools, but it appears to provide little relief to the tiny characters that populate the scenes. Storms have long been used by American landscape painters and photographers as a visual metaphor for imminent or receding catastrophe. How one reads this particular storm may serve a Rorschach test for the one’s own faith in history in the summer of 2020.
Visitors view Gregory Crewdson’s photographs, Tinworks Art 2021 @ Rialto, Bozeman, MT. Photo: Blair Speed Creative.
ABOUT GREGORY CREWDSON
Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer best known for staging cinematic scenes of suburbia to dramatic effect. In 1985, he received a BA from the State University of New York-Purchase College, where he studied photography with Jan Groover and Laurie Simmons. He graduated with an MFA in photography from Yale University in 1988. For his thesis project, he took photographic portraits of residents of the area around Lee, Massachusetts, where his family had a cabin. It was also in Lee that Crewdson conceived of his later Natural Wonder series (1992–97), in which birds, insects, and mutilated body parts are presented in surreal yet mundane domestic settings. Photographs from Natural Wonder were shown in the 1991 exhibition Pleasures and Terrors in Domestic Comfort at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In his next series, Hover (1995–97), Crewdson turned away from brightly colored close-ups to black-and-white bird’s-eye views of strange situations (a man covering a street with sod, a bear gawked at by onlookers as it rummages through garbage) set in the streets and backyards of Lee. His series Twilight (1998–2001) and Beneath the Roses (2004–08) introduced color and an enlarged scale—50 x 60 inches—to this surreal formula, resulting in decidedly cinematic images reminiscent of the films of Steven Spielberg.
Crewdson has had solo exhibitions at the Houston Center for Photography (1992), Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (1997), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (1998), SITE Santa Fe (2001), and Kunstverein Hannover (2005). He has appeared in many group shows since 1991, including the Kwangju Biennale (1997), Where: Allegories of Site in Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1998), Open Ends: Sets and Situations at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2000), Vision from America at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2002), and three exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (the first two traveling to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao): Moving Pictures (2002 and 2003), Speaking with Hands (2004 and 2005), and Family Pictures (2007). He received fellowships from the Aaron Siskind Foundation in 1991 and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992. In 2004, he received the Skowhegan Medal for Photography from the Showhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Crewdson began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in 1990, and following brief stints at Purchase College, the Cooper Union, and Vassar College, he took a position in the photography department at Yale University in 1993. Crewdson lives and works in New Haven and New York.