ANGELA STRASSHEIM
Left Behind
March 24 through April 30, 2005

Caught Looking
Angela Strassheim peers into the crevices of American Life
by Jean Dykstra
March/April 2005

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.