On occasion a mistake comes to pass. Deana Lawson's photography show, "Matters of Grace," is full of mistakes. It is riddled with them.
The brilliance - and perhaps genius - of Lawson RISD GS is that through these "mistakes" she manages to insert the painterly into photography.
Photography has long been considered on the margins of high art, with critics questioning its value. Photography is the work of a machine, not a person. It records what it sees, but does not interpret it, as does painting, for example.
Lawson's photographs are staged. As she explains in a brief essay on the exhibit, even the minute details are directed, from the setting to the expression on her subjects' faces.
Staging photographs is anything but new. Fictional films, by their very nature, are staged photographs. Elementary school photos are staged - few children pose in front of draped backgrounds more than once a year. Something in Lawson's work is different, though.
Her photographs come across as snapshots - their clarity and balance could be accidental. The photos capture the subjects indoors, in stages of dress and undress, boredom and wincing. The settings are mundane - chairs, curtains, carpets are well worn.
Lawson's subjects do not pose in these settings to show off or to say, "I was here," as is the case with most travel photographs. They don't avoid setting, as with the perhaps absurdly draped backgrounds featured in most portrait photography, nor do they serve to mark holidays, birthdays, celebrations or mourning. As with Nan Goldin's photos of friends, they are non-events.
Lawson chooses black women as the subject of her photos. "It was important in this body of work to discover a visual poetics using black women as the focus point, since I found that little existed for this particular group elsewhere. As a child, I lived and interacted in a predominately female domestic space, which influenced my choice of subject matter for this project. The women and girls in this series are ordinary people - both strangers that I have met at church or the local supermarket and my own family members. They are seen every day, in all walks of life," she said.
But there is more to her work.
Lawson's photographs simply "are." She has staged the mundane. And here is where she adds the painterly touch. The mundane is staged, but a photograph is taken and the staging itself is marked - Lawson has essentially photographed a one-woman play.
In spite of Lawson's minute direction, her subjects slip and fail to realize her direction here and there, though we don't actually know where, and the work is no longer just Lawson's - it is also her subjects'. She calls these slips "sites of leakage."
"These sites are the uncontrollable domains of the self where the internal leaks into the external world," she said.
Many forget that photography is "not art," but rather the work of a machine. A problem remains, however - machines don't slip as Lawson and her subjects do. Yet the five works of Lawson's "Matters of Grace" are undeniably photographs. They glow with a crispness and ripeness of color that painting will never attain.
Through her mistakes - a mundane event, a snapshot staged, something mechanical yet subjective - Lawson creates works at once daring and soothing, framed by a powerful personal aesthetic.
"Matters of Grace" is Lawson's MFA thesis work from RISD. With such strong work coming from an artist so young, many wait impatiently to see Lawson develop further.
"Matters of Grace" will appear at the Sarah Doyle Women's Center until Oct. 29.
