Ralph Eugene Meatyard: No-Focus
Reducing groups of human figures to indistinct abstractions, the artist proposes an alternate notion to the traditional photographic portrait.
Fraenkel Gallery will be closed starting Thursday, November 28. We will reopen Tuesday, December 3 for the final weeks of our Kota Ezawa exhibition.
Reducing groups of human figures to indistinct abstractions, the artist proposes an alternate notion to the traditional photographic portrait.
Reducing groups of human figures to indistinct abstractions, the artist proposes an alternate notion to the traditional photographic portrait.
The series presents portraits of the artist’s wife wearing a dime-store hag’s mask, paired with various family members and friends who wear a transparent hard-plastic mask. The titles of the images outline cryptic relationships, and in all instances, both figures are identified by the same name: Lucybelle Crater.
A fervent reader, Meatyard was deeply influenced by the writer Ambrose Bierce’s definition in The Devil’s Dictionary: “ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are.”
Meatyard’s staged images—set in abandoned spaces and often using masks and props—are at once familiar and enigmatic, reflecting the artist’s fascination with the uncanniness of ordinary life.
Using movement to follow luminescent, broken reflections in water, the artist’s experimental photographs create a free-form effect similar to qualities of Abstract Expressionist paintings.