Deborah Paauwe
Art Statements Gallery
Reviewed: April 8
Quiet, structured, elegant, unsettling - all these words describe Deborah Paauwe's colour photographs ... but not quite. These are precise images, unrelenting in their closeness, detail and flat lighting.
And there are implicit narratives everywhere (especially in titles such as Hide & Seek, Dark Fables or Small Hours). There are stories with no beginnings or happy endings, just fragments of staged time with little or no context. But these moments are hardly empty. In fact, the photos seem full of gesture, intimacy and cross-generational femininity.
The figures in Paauwe's images are usually truncated girls or women, cut by the frame. And this is the same for the narratives that run through and across each series. Chinese Whispers (right) features a pair of whispering prom- or bridesmaid-dressed teenage girls. There's an air of intimacy as one touches the other, faces close, buried under falling hair.