As one of the most arresting, provocative, and unpredictable photographers around, Justine Kurland, at fifty-six, deserves to have her mid-career retrospective in a museum. Instead, it’s at the small, scrappy gallery Osmos, in the East Village (through Nov. 21), where it is both comfortably at home and quietly overwhelming. The gallery describes Kurland as seeing her subjects “through a queer feminist lens,” which is immediately evident in the works on view, but can’t begin to account for their range, wit, or depth of feeling. She’s not always subtle—see the collage series she calls the “SCUMB Manifesto,” after Valerie Solanas, in which she cuts up the work of white male artists—and is far too present in the moment to be a cool observer. Even the classic Western landscape images that include the trains her young son was obsessed with are more dream than document: wonder realized, simply sublime.
The show opens with two pictures from the color series that introduced Kurland to the world and became known as the “Girl Pictures”—cinematic shots of adolescent girls playing at being runaways. Under the photographer’s rapt gaze, theatricality melts away and we’re caught up in the sweet, casually intimate camaraderie of girls on an adventure. Although most of the other women here are naked, the vision isn’t always Edenic. Communal life, a frequent subject, includes hard work; motherhood, even in a seemingly idyllic group of ten women with babies, isn’t any easier. Hung between these larger color photographs are smaller black-and-white images that feel like diary entries. In one, Kurland is lying naked with her mother; in another, she’s masturbating, body contorted, head thrown back, suspended between agony and ecstasy. Throughout her show, Kurland keeps us both fascinated and on edge—anywhere but in our comfort zone.—Vince Aletti