Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographs from Gregory Crewdson’s series Twilight, on view from February 19 – March 25, 2000. Crewdson continues his ongoing series of elaborately staged, large-scale tableaux that explore the domestic landscape and its relationship to the natural world. Started in 1998, the Twilight series explores his interest in the uncanny and its relationship to domesticity, nature and the American vernacular. These themes were first addressed in his color series Natural Wonder (1991-1995) and his black and white landscape photographs hover (1995-1997).
Crewdson’s photographs take place in quotidian environments where domestic occurrences and other everyday events are played out for the camera. These narratives occur at twilight, the magic hour where ordinary routines can undergo enigmatic transformations. This collision between the normal and the paranormal produce a tension that serves to transform the topology of the suburban landscape into a place of wonder and anxiety.
The scenes of Twilight are created in collaboration with a large production crew, and the members of a small suburban community. They employ a highly conscious interplay of lighting, staging, props and special effects. The photographs are taken from a wide range of vantage points; from the hovering perspective of a crane to claustrophobic close-ups. This seamless blurring of photographic realism and hyperbolic fiction produces a complex and compelling set of tensions that bring together the ordinary and the sublime. In this merging, Crewdson has established a photographic sensibility that takes its place within the mythological landscape of the American imagination.
Crewdson is an internationally exhibited artist. He has recently shown in Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Stockholm and Madrid. This will be his third solo exhibition in New York since his last show at Luhring Augustine in 1997. Concurrent with this exhibition, Crewdson is exhibiting early work (1987-1988) from February 5 through March 25, 2000 at Partobject Gallery in North Carolina. These color photographs are early examples of Crewdson's investigation into the suburban surreal and illustrate the origins of his pictoral sensibility.
