CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – “Vanity” is one of those words loaded with cultural baggage, from the Bible (“everything is vanity”) to philosophy (“Vanity is the fear of appearing original,” according to Nietzsche) to literature (Ezra Pounds ‘Pull down your vanity’). In a photo exhibition by Holly Wright at the Fralin Museum of Art, the word takes on connotations from “vain” to “vanitas.”
Holly Wright: Vanity opens with the title series of photographs, ten close-ups of the artist’s hands from 1985 to ’88. Is it useless to photograph your hands? Maybe, but without a text on the wall nearby, it can be difficult to distinguish exactly which part of the body you’re looking at. Using various blur effects, Wright emphasizes folds, tears and folds, transforming them into fleshy abstractions. These can be somewhat disturbing. For example, an image of four fingernails seemingly pressed into the skin can be read as teeth. Two photos subtitled ‘Black Hole’ show deep wells of darkness in the hand’s cramped universe.
In the 1993 series PoetryWright offers contact sheet-like arrangements of photographs of her husband, Charles Wright’s, mouth in the middle of the recitation. In these close-ups, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. Poet Laureate is reduced to, well, a mouthpiece, his lips, sometimes in partial shadow, forming words we can’t hear. While these stop-action shots can be fascinating, these works certainly drag down [his] proud.”
The poet also appeared in another Wright series, True saints (1980–84), featuring portraits of friends and family playing the roles of Biblical figures. “My special interest,” the artist once said about these enactments“is role play and self-images, what is real and what is authentically fake.”
This makes for a nice follow-up to the third series in the show, Latest portraits (1980-1983). For these full-length studies, Wright asked her subjects to think about how they might greet death – what they would look like, what they would wear, etc. In “Vivian and Bob Folkenflik” (1983), the eponymous couple lie loosely side by side . hand in hand, ready to meet their maker with what seems like open-eyed fortitude. The details draw you in: her sandals, his wrinkled pants at the knees, the leaf pattern of the sheet they lie on. For his earthly finale, the Wrights’ son Luke chose to arm himself with a gun, ax and knife, his small body stretched out on the ground in a chilling vanitas image of death amidst life.
Holly Wright: Vanity continues at the Fralin Museum of Art through January 5, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Hannah Cattarin and M. Jordan Love.
