March/April 2005, vol. 9, no. 4
p. 34 - 35

Focus on / Jean Dykstra

Caught Looking:
Angela Strassheim peers into the crevices of American Life

Those who saw Angela Strassheim’s untitled photograph in “Black Milk,” Marvelli Gallery’s group show this past summer, are in for a bit of a surprise when her solo show opens March 24. In “Black Milk,” she showed a large color C-print of a pale, naked woman sprawled on a disheveled bed, a re-creation of a suicide (the rather morbid theme of the show). The work was one of several photographs she had been making on the subject of crime scenes even before she attended Yale, where she completed her M.F.A. in 2003. In contrast, the new photographs in her first solo show at Marvelli, on view March 23 through April 30, are what she describes as “Norman Rockwellish, about family and childhood memories.”

If her general subjects- “the Midwest and the middle-class American family with the dog, etc.”- resemble those depicted by Norman Rockwell, her photographs have little of the unvarnished innocence of his illustrations. There’s a sense of emptiness or foreboding permeating the tidy homes and well-groomed families in the simple almost austere images. They’re not overtly eerie, or “uncanny,” like the work of Gregory Crewdson. (He was one of Strassheim’s teachers at Yale, though she points to director of photography Todd Pappageorge as her most significant influence there.) Rather, you have the uncomfortable feeling of being caught looking at a moment of intimacy or vulnerability you weren’t intended to see. In one of her recent color C-prints (generally 30 by 40 inches), a woman, eyes closed, lies in a yellow claw-foot bathtub while a plump toddler, in blonde ponytails and a pink diaper, sits on a chair and washes her hair. In another, a well-scrubbed man and his son, both in starched white shirts and red ties, stand somberly before the bathroom sink while the father carefully combs the boy’s strawberry blond hair; the only bits of bright color are the red ties and two toothbrushes, one blue and one orange, resting on the white sink. In another image, a dreary, nearly unpopulated fish tank sits against the white wall of a white-carpeted room, with the cloudy, algae-green water as a counterpoint to a poster or painting of a bright blue seascape just visible through an open door.

Strassheim’s eye for color and the rich visual content of her photographs bring to mind Philip-Lorca diCorcia, another teacher of hers at Yale, but also Mitch Epstein. Like him, Strassheim transforms pedestrian objects and everyday scenes into symbolically loaded, psychologically charged photographs using a deceptively deadpan approach. The psychological complexity of these photographs may stem from the fact that she took this most recent series in and around Minneapolis, where she grew up, and some of the subjects are members of her own family, who happen to be conservative, born-again Christians. “I never felt that I fit in,” she says. “I knew that wasn’t the way I believed, and I had to fight with that my entire life.”

Her first professional ambition was not to be a photographer, but a forensic pathologist. She first saw a dead body when she was only nine years old. On a walk by herself along a lake behind her family’s subdivision, she came across the feet of a corpse sticking out of the water. She ran to the nearest house for help, then watched as the paramedics came and put the body on a stretcher. “I was fascinated,” she says. After earning a B.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (where she is currently teaching a class), she was certified as a forensic photographer, which is how she made a living for several years in Miami and New York. All that time spent looking at dead bodies in the morgue, she says, “took away my fear of dying.”

That compulsion to look –an exploration of the voyeuristic impulse- informs all of her work. In another recent photograph, a young woman can be seen through the window of a house, undressing in a second-story bedroom; the photograph itself was taken at night, some distance away, and the branches in the foreground suggest it was taken by someone spying on her from the woods. In the photograph of the mother and daughter in the bathroom, the half-open door in the foreground is a clear sign that we are peering in, uninvited. Strassheim may visit some of the same territory that Norman Rockwell did, but Rockwell’s take on the American family was never this ambivalent.

April 8, 2005

ANGELA STRASSHEIM, "Left Behind," Marvelli, 526 West 26th Street, (212) 627-3363, through April 30. The large, extraordinarily vivid color photographs in this young artist's first New York solo show have a subtly gripping archetypal magic. The businessman-father formally posed at his desk; the regal mother standing before her mansion; the glowing little girl at the window; the grandmother in her coffin; the debauched daughter sprawled naked in her dorm room: the images are like scenes from a contemporary fairy tale. JOHNSON

April 13 – 19, 2005; p. 57

SHORTLIST

Photo
Angela Strassheim Hard to know just what to make of Angela Strassheim’s maniacally accomplished debut show, perhaps because her big color photos blur the line between fact and fiction to such unsettling effect. Among her subjects are her father, her brother and his young son, and her grandmother, the last seen laid out in a pink-lined coffin, all presented as if embalmed by convention. Other photos record the loosening or breakdown of those conventions, none more forcefully than the staged image of a naked young suicide victim twisted grotesquely on her rumpled bed. Through April 30, Marvelli Gallery, 526 W 26th, 212.627.3363 ALETTI

May 2005
Angela Strassheim
Left Behind
Marvelli Gallery

Political art, it goes without saying, is an oppositional art. But the exhibition Left Behind, Angela Strassheim’s series of large-scale C-prints at Marvelli Gallery, deals with a hot-button topic, the Christian right, without attempting to reassure its likely audience of its own enlightenment. Instead, Strassheim’s solo debut offers a troubling, nuanced, and dispassionate view of the deeply human need to construct a belief system against the pitiless vagaries of life and death.

Strassheim comes from a born-again Christian family in Minnesota. According to the exhibition’s press release, the title Left Behind refers not only to the “unsaved” souls left behind after the Rapture has transported the faithful into heaven but also to “the memory and evidence people create that outlives them.” Portraits of the artist’s family are juxtaposed with images of domestic narratives, inspired by childhood and adult experiences.” The press release adds that Strassheim’s “obsessively careful compositions and lighting” were developed from her experience as a certified forensic photographer.

The images, all untitled, are resolutely open ended: a man combs a boy’s hair in a bathroom mirror; a young girl rests on a bed, gazing skyward, arms outstretched; another girl, with strawberry blond hair and a pretty pink dress, stands tiptoe on a windowsill, searching the outdoors for –what? The Rapture? A bespectacled granny lies in an über-pink coffin. Is she left behind, or is she saved? Is anyone portrayed here among the elect? And what of Strassheim’s cryptic reference to the evidence people create” -is it an accusation or a lament?

As in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Silence, we’re as likely to know the landscape of each other’s souls as we are to comprehend the mind of God. The photographs’ formal perfection –their clean, luminous color, meticulous detail, and relentless symmetry- belie the forbidden sensuality throbbing beneath their honeyed surfaces. The pictures of children are especially disturbing. They embody the tendency of the religious right to fetishize innocence, interpreting a child’s simplicity as the perfect spiritual state (“Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven”). But this adult/child convergence feels a hair’s breadth from sexualization of childhood. In the photograph of the strawberry blonde looking out the window, her dress barely covers the curve of her buttocks, let alone her long downy legs. The girl reclining on the bed seems to be greeting an imaginary lover. And the man grooming the boy in the bathroom mirror seems frozen in the cold, hard light –or is the scrupulous symmetry of the composition locking down his desire? A roll of toilet paper in the corner (which wouldn’t be there, in light of the artist’s perfectionism, if not for a reason) seems to suggest that besmirchment’s just a swipe away.

Are we in the presence of a heroic resistance to temptation or a hypocritical stench? Whatever our bias, the fact remains that these people are the artist’s family, and it seems unlikely that she’d be able to enlist their participation without a mutual love and respect. Not to mention trust. In one viscerally distressing image, a pretty, demurely smiling young woman sits on a carpeted floor in a white satin slip, under which she’s tucked her hideously deformed feet. Yet there isn’t even a whiff of exploitation –in fact, what’s most striking about the photo is the woman’s self-possession and inner peace. Has her faith helped her surmount her disfigurement? We’ll never know; the picture’s untitled.

Strassheim’s use of symmetry appears to be a metaphor for the strict control her subjects exercise over their lives. This may feel repellent to freethinkers, but isn’t the beauty we find in symmetry derived from the comfort we take in its certitudes? And doesn’t the demolition of any dearly held article of faith –religious, political, social, or philosophical- have the potential to be psychologically devastating?

In a stark departure from other images, Strassheim jettisons the symmetry that governs the series to drive home her most explicit point. A naked woman (nude would be too genteel) sprawls provocatively across an unmade bed, confronting the viewer with her dark patch of pubic hair and the grimy sole of her left foot. Her puke-flecked cheeks and an overturned pharmaceutical vial indicate suicide. The woman’s dirty foot (do we dare pun soiled soul?) brings to mind Caravaggio’s filthy-footed worshippers in the Madonna of the Pilgrims, which so shocked the pious of its day. Just as thee devotional classicism of the Quattrocentro –undermined by the rampant Church corruption and riven by the Reformation –gave way to Caravaggio’s borderline-heretical, savagely off-kilter canvases, this image signals the mental and spiritual shambles that remain after a rigid orthodoxy is splintered by the seams of doubt.

-Thomas Micchelli

Issue 78, February 2006, London, UK

New York: Marvelli Gallery
Angela Strassheim 24 March - 30 April 2005

Angela Strassheim trained and practiced as a forensic photographer before going through Yale's postgraduate programme. Her first solo show is unusual, not just for the eerie quality of her work, but also due to the novelty of her personal history; and it is her life that encomasses and unfolds in these photographs. These large-scale colour photographs are of her familyyet, unlike Richard Billingham's they do not appear dysfunctional - they are born-again Christians and seem altogether wholesome. A child, maybe her younger sister, plays with her toys; in another the same girl looks out the window. An old woman, her grandmother perhaps, lies in a coffin, and her mother stands in front of the house while another sister sits in her nightgown in the corridor, appearing quietly angelic. Finally, there is a shot of the family fish tank -the strangest image of the lot.

Is this documentary work? THe images appear posed, but are they meant to tell us about the people depictd or the invisible entity behind the lens? Does something lurk beneath? The photographs seem to hint at a moment of tension, or maybe we have just been exposed to far too many Hollywood narratives, and, in truth, these are just nice, well-to-do suburbanites. However, some of the images are recreations - a naked girl sprawled on a bed for example -and it is Strassheim's clever manipulation of this zone between fact and fiction that raises the level of tension. Mixed in with the family portraiture, every image is thus placed under question.

Ultimately, one is left with more questions than answers. THis is not to deny the visual riches that Strassheim displays; rather than the tradition of Nan Goldin or Paul Graham or the theater of Gregory Crewdson, she seems to have chosen an approach that is closer to painting. Like Vermeer or Hopper, a vignette is displayed, albeit with a subtle sense of tension. Colour and light is focused on the subject and a certain nostalgic atmosphere is created, as if her subjects were in a state of reverie. Perhaps it is, as the title of the show sugests, all "Left Behind".
-Sherman Sam

February 27, 2006

Ready to Watch
By Karen Rosenberg

“A biennial dies every 30 seconds in the world,” curator Philippe Vergne is fond of saying. Still, the Whitney’s version never goes quietly, and like a supernova, it scatters light and energy into the atmosphere. We’ve identified ten artists who, we think, are likely to be around when the dust settles. In the spirit of this globalized Biennial, five hail from the West Coast, three from Europe, and one from West End Avenue. Get a glimpse of them now, while New York’s still the center of the universe.

ANGELA STRASSHEIM, photography
C.S.I. meets Billy Graham in the domestic scenes of Angela Strassheim, 36, who was raised in a born-again Christian household in Minnesota. For her 2005 Marvelli Gallery solo called “Left Behind” (after the Evangelical book series), Strassheim shot family and friends in suspenseful, deliberative moments—a girl sprawled in a Christ-like pose on her canopy bed, a father combing the hair of his hollow-eyed son as they dress for church, even her grandmother in a coffin. Some scenes are staged, others (like the grandmother) real. “I was photographing in the morgue, and photographing a lot at home, and slowly finding a relationship between the two,” says Strassheim, who used to record autopsies for New York City. While at Yale in 2001, she helped with the caseload after 9/11. “None of the other students in art school wanted to see those pictures,” she recalls

MARCH 2006

ELLE MUST SEE
HOT SHOTS
The 2006 Whitney Biennial showcases a trio of young photographers who shed light on the darker side of the human experience

“I have a pretty healthy relationship with death,” says Angela Strassheim, an artist in her midthirties, whose eloquent images –which take months and in some cases years to orchestrate- are rich with intimations of mortality. Strassheim, who divides her time between New York and Minneapolis, is drawn to disquieting themes that undercut her own idyllic suburban childhood. She honed her skills shooting crime scenes and flying around in a Blackhawk helicopter doing surveillance as a forensic photographer in Dade County, Florida. That background is evident, especially in a powerful photo of the body of her beloved grandmother, “the first person close to me who has ever died.” Strassheim considers her work “a long, slow journey,” with the ultimate aim of investigating relationships and moments of loss. “The important thing for me is to be honest,” she says. –Aaron Gell

Iles/Vergne, Whitney Biennial2006: Day For Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

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