GRACE WESTON, L’ENFANT TERRIBLE
Does anyone remember the mechanical robin at the end of “Blue Velvet”? If Lynch’s scene was a quirky love letter to that ersatz quietude of suburban angst, then Grace Weston’s controlled environments comprise a fitting post script, albeit with a bit more humor to assuage our anxiety. Still, I’m nervous looking at these photographs, as if I’m on the hypnagogic verge of a nightmare. In Weston’s dreamscapes, Bambi becomes the hunter, babies turn into towering portents, and seemingly innocuous archetypes pull us into a secret world of unpredictable danger. She achieves this tension through intensified colors, inverted scales, and pliant smiles juxtaposed with living organs, twittering birds, and mushroom clouds. In short, Weston’s work has the quality of incipient Grand Guignol, incorporating the antipodal textures of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and Hieronymous Bosch. Here is Weston, in her own words:
My creativity is stimulated most by the questions and contradictions of Life, both large and small. For the subject matter of my photography, I construct sets as well as fabricate and find props and characters to express my “inner” world, creating vignettes that incorporate narration, humor and a sense of psychological tension. Child-like fantasy scenes are punctuated with anxieties common to adulthood: choices must be made, demons haunt us, beauty conceals danger, the end of the world is near, and perhaps God does not have our best interests in mind. Picasso said, “Art is a lie that tells the truth”. I make up visual stories that address the dilemmas, illusions and fears that at once seem so personal, yet are also universal. As a child, I entertained myself by staging little dioramas with toys and found or constructed objects in a corner of my bedroom to view and rearrange for weeks at a time. I fabricated a private reality this way, and it served as a great consolation in a world over which I had no control. I now realize I’ve come back to where I started, and at the same time, to where I’ve never been. It is through my little fictions I most enjoy taking a stab at Truth.
