Justine Kurland at Monte Clarke Gallery (55 Mill, Bldg 2), to April 23, reception Saturday (March 25), 3-6 pm. 416-703-1700. Artist’s talk at the Power Plant (231 Queens Quay West), Friday (March 24), 7 pm. Free. Rating: NNNN Rating: NNNN
Justine Kurland’s photographs are windows onto an unsettling mythical world populated entirely by adolescent girls.
Roving in packs, her nymphets participate in rites of passage and exploration with feral innocence. The photos depict their all-girl society clinging to the remnants of nature at the edge of urban areas, a post-apocalyptic utopia of stagnant ponds, abandoned rail yards and patches of field near empty freeways.
Complex staging and crystalline focus give Kurland’s C-prints a dreamlike and uncanny lustre. Her subjects improvised the activities for each shot, lending a performative element to the work.
Puzzling details contradict the sunny vision of grrl power: many girls wear uniforms, negating the idea of individuality and evoking an ominous Lord Of The Flies sense of the pack or tribe. Every naive gesture is subtly laced with indolence and threat.
Death hoveras nearby as well. In one print, three girls are suspended mid- jump, about to tumble gleefully down the side of a dune. In another, two girls cross a pond while one floats Ophelia- like in the foreground. In the third, a girl pulls a pile of lifeless bodies along the shore on an improvised raft made of bamboo and Coke bottles. Are they playing? Kurland leaves this up to the viewer, summoning the ambiguity that pervades adolescence.
Many of us have indulged in idyllic afternoons of exploration around the edges of the urban landscape, ditching school to poke around a dry creek bed, train yard or abandoned warehouse, constructing spontaneous rituals to make sense of what we were growing into. Kurland memorializes these moments of imaginative possibility, when we stood outside of what society and our future demanded of us.
