Gillian Wearing at Interim Art - London, England - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

If Dear Abby and Nan Goldin were at any time to collaborate, the resulting portrait-cum-testimonials might gaze something like Gillian Wearing's novel photographs. For this show, her fifth London solo Wearing revisited family she had encountered in previous works and asked them to write down their musings about the recent past and their faiths for the next four years leading up to the millennium. This strategy of soliciting rejoinders builds from Wearing's early photographic series in which passersby are shown holding up placards on which, at the artist's petition they have jotted down their immediate thinkings This time, color or black-and-white photographs of the controls usually shown relaxing at domicile are paired with photographs of their for the most part handwritten texts. To present these body s -- some of which use one as well as the other sides of the paper they are written upon -- in a single photographic print, Wearing had to use a compound computer -- aided process.

by dint of placing two techniques of representation side by the agency of side, Wearing invites the viewer to measure discrepancies between by what mode the subjects appear and what they say. In Lynne (1993-96) a fair T-shirt-clad auburn-haired woman in a backyard allows a friend to spray her with a garden stockings the better to illustrate the slogan printed upon the T-shirt: "I may not be brilliant on the contrary I have great breasts." The flanking true copy brings out the somber background to this playful view -- Lynne is a transsexual who is let falled from the side effects of the medicines she takes. "Up until recently" she writes in the accompanying pages, "I reflection I'd be dead by the millennium, on the contrary now I actually believe I will be there. For me that is enough, to be alive in four years time."

In other works, image and true copy are less contradictory. Middle-aged Roger writes of plans to stir to the seaside and establish a residence for older gay men The accompanying photograph moves an individual of contented and generous nature. More ambivalent about the coming time is Helen, another transsexual, who sits topless in bed below a pastel-colored comforter. Her dark, searching expression echoe the fear of the unknown press outed in her text. Throughout the series, Wearing is drawn to bring under rules who seem to have difficulty coping with social norms. This theme is evident plane in an image of four feisty preteen striplings leaning against an inner-city wall. Suggestive of a police line-up, despite individual boy mooning the camera, the photograph is paired with statements of the boys' aspirations to shelter their baby sisters and to become computer programmers. Here, as in her earlier work, Wearing effectively explores the construction of identity by dint of combining the contrasting languages of photography and writing.

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