Perfection

I've been to a lot of art galleries over the years in many large and small cities and I've never been more impressed than when I walked into So-Oh Art Gallery in Lincoln, NE. Usually the 95%/5% rule applies especially in art galleries. Do you know this rule? Look at any collection of art, Top 100 Billboard albums this week, the top 100 films released in a given year, etc. 95% will be absolute crap, and 5% will have some merit. If you break that 5% barrier consider it a lucky break (which might be the case last year if you look at films--it's been a pretty good year).

Anyway, So-Oh Gallery breaks that ceiling handily. I'd guess that I'd be happy to have a third of the art hanging in my home. That's why I'm so pleased to have acquired this photo that has haunted me since the first time I saw it several years ago. Perfection by Barbara Abel is extraordinary but I'll leave this article to better describe the interesting history behind this series of mannequins. An excerpt:

Manufactured in Europe and the States from the 1890s through the late 1940s, they looked like a fucking freak show, totally creepy with human hair, gemlike glass eyes and porcelain dentures. Sunlight melted their makeup and they were hollow to the core, but for all intents and purposes, these idols of desire sold sex to the bourgeoisie better than a streetwalker. Window shopping became a mindless leisure activity sedating women, lulling them into a fantasy world as they imagined what life would be like as an impeccably dressed dummy. Outfitted in couture, the sculptures, especially those manufactured in the renowned Pierre Imans Studio in early 1900s Paris, were avant-garde artworks available for all the city to see...

"I never realized it would change things so much for me," Abel says, about her portrait series Tragic Beauties. The West Bloomfield resident shot four rolls of film in one afternoon in 1995. Since then, she's become a dedicated participant in the national art fair circuit, exhibiting her work to a general audience and eliciting strong reactions like fear and anger. In a review, a local critic once mistook her photos for images of real women made up to look abused.

Abel's traveled to Ohio, Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York shooting private collections of wax mannequins, many of which now sell for hundreds of dollars to more than a thousand apiece. Her photos have appeared in numerous shows across the Midwest and East Coast, including a solo show at New York's Viridian Gallery, curated by Susan Harris, formerly of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her photographs also hung two years ago in the show Guys n' Dolls, in Brighton, England, alongside images by Man Ray and Hans Bellmer.

Surrealists like Ray and Bellmer used dolls to toy with fear, death and desire in a time of Nazism. And later, American filmmakers from the 1950s and 60s confronted the issue of conformity with doppelgängers in science fiction and horror movies, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In 1960, The Twilight Zone aired an episode called "After Hours," featuring a houswife who turns into a mannequin.

You can see a good online gallery of the works at So-Oh here. Check out the Larry Welo and the Deborah Mae Broad.