NYAB Event - Elaine Duigenan "Intimate Archaeology"

Elaine Duigenan "Intimate Archaeology"

This event has ended.
At Klompching Gallery
Media: Photography

Although usually viewed as something ordinary, functional and familiar, these modern-day digital photograms reveal stockings and hairnets as objects of beauty and intrigue. Duigenan fetishizes intimate female apparel in a manner which is not only scientific in its archaeological approach, but also displays a delicate, flirty sensuality.
The machine-manufactured stockings, crisply detailed in their softness and overlapping textures, contrast with the often hand-woven hairnets dating from the 1920’s to 1950’s. The fact that many of these hairnets were made from real human hair, sets up all kinds of musings. Whose hair? Who knotted and wore the net? Because it never dies, hair is a curiously emotive thing — the Victorians commonly collected it as momento mori.