NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian announced its first solo exhibition of works by Deana Lawson. Opening on September 10 at 541 West 24th Street in New York, the exhibition of mirror-framed photographs and holograms engages issues of personhood, surveillance, and control.
Lawson debuts selections from Edge Control, a series initiated in 2023 in which she reimagines the monitoring of individuals by beauty supply stores throughout the United States. Recontextualizing surveillance stills taped to windows and entryways, she preserves the ways in which these images warp identity and posit a mode of figuration, intervening only to protect the identities of those pictured.
The title Edge Control derives from one of the stores’ most frequently stolen products: a gel used to smooth and lay down the baby hairs along women’s and girls’ hairlines, creating a sleek, polished look. The phrase refers to both the gel itself and to systems of control in the surveilled frame, extending to a broader culture of image-based policing. According to Lawson, “the aesthetic of surveillance imagery—deep-horizon blues and greens—opened my thoughts to an alien view of the supply chain, and its final landing point in the familiar beauty stores that I often frequent.” The pictures are framed with luminous black mirrors, underscoring both their reverence and their futurity. The work neither condemns nor valorizes alleged acts of petty theft, but instead foregrounds the implications of agency and transformative potential of beauty products within our late capitalist society.
The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s recent large-scale photographs taken in domestic interiors. Figures gaze directly at Lawson’s camera in these highly detailed images, which draw on the aesthetics of family albums as well as the meticulous compositions and symbolism of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Lawson asserts the value of deep greens, mauves, yellows, and browns amid a contemporary world she feels is bereft of local color. Integral to the portraits’ creation is the collaboration between the artist and her subjects, many of whom she meets on a life path that is neither routine nor predictable.
The exhibition also features new holograms encased in layers of glass. An extension of Edge Control, these works were inspired in part by Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (1977). This dystopian novel envisioned high-tech “scramble suits” capable of obscuring the wearer’s identity by projecting an ever-changing mosaic of physiognomic fragments in an age of widespread surveillance and paranoia.
