PHOTO:Sally Man- Remembered Light
Sally Man first received critical attention for her series “At Twelve” (1983–85), which depicted 12-year-old girls on the brink of adolescence. Between 1984 and 1991 she produced “Immediate Family”, which traced seven years in the lives of her three children. The series, which explored the charged expanses of time between childhood and adulthood, innocence and guile, was alternately praised for its unsettling candor in depicting adolescence and decried as pornographic and exploitative.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery archive
As her children grew older, Mann shifted her focus to the landscape of the American South, in the series “Mother Land” (1996) and “Deep South” (1998). Created with a large-format vintage camera fitted with aged and flawed lenses, resulting in scratchy prints with darkened edges and softly rendered subjects, her images resembled works of 19th Century Pictorialist photography, which, through soft focus and lens coatings, sought to emulate the painting of its time. Her continued use of the collodion wet-plate process, employing 8 x 10 inch glass negatives, lends her images the formal aura of artifact and conceptually reflects her exploration of the suppressed histories of the antebellum South. In her latest exhibition “Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington” presents photographs spanning more than a decade, she records in fleeting impressions the working habitat of Cy Twombly, her close friend and mentor. Twombly and Mann are both natives of Virginia. The landscape to which Twombly returned each year is also the memoryscape of Mann’s connection to him. This was documented in her recent and celebrated memoir “Hold Still”, in which she recalls his elemental nature, his southern courtesy, his wry and gentle humor. In images such as “Remembered Light”, “Untitled (Angled Light)” (1999-00), the unremarkable passage of time is evoked, as well as the willed quietude that surrounded Twombly’s creative existence. With “Untitled (Squat White Sculpture” and “Paint Edges)” (both 2012), Mann indicates the haptic processes leading to the creation of one of his sculptures. Even without the artist’s actual presence, Mann is able to vividly evoke the human traces evident in daily life and work.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 22/9-29/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:000, www.gagosian.com
