Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Rana Young
American; 21st-century
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
43%
Untitled (silhouette). 2016. Archival pigment print
There's slight interest in the way the silhouetted figure interrupts the seascape — namely the shift in color and surface quality between body and blurred scene — but this is hardly sufficient. The Romantic compositional trope isn't challenged, undercut, advanced, or questioned, but rather picked up and tossed on like your half-dirty workout shirt. Uncritical adoption of received formats or wisdoms is the definition of kitsch: it's art misunderstanding what it's mediating and what are its proper effects. Here, this dynamic manifests as a pat call for empathy — we've been trained to fall into seamless identification with subjects presented in this pictorial way, so the photo expects us to react almost irrespective of the way it has, so to speak, presented its presentation. To do so would be to respond to things other than what this artwork is doing as art. (2024)
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
34%
Untitled (stockings). 2016. Archival pigment print
Had this image not been produced within a culture that has so intensely pathologized and politicized the sexual, it would have nothing about it (or hardly anything besides that bathetic stare) that has to do with art. Lacking much in the way of composition — the hedges form an awkward enclosure, the leaves are too minimized to provide much of a productively hectic effect, none of the geometries coalesce into any sort of order — all it provides is an image of a genderbender turning around glumly. If the artist had wanted to humanize this person or communicate something substantive about their gendered alienation, she might rather have done so by mediating some of her "content" through a pictorial structure adequate for conveying it. But to present her subject so expectantly, so ambivalently, so readily, is basically just to invite us to gawk. (2024)