Hannah Whitaker’s exhibition Shadow Detail includes several interrelated components: new photographs, a large collaged triptych, a video work, and several sculptural lamps. An expansion of the photographic series featured in her recent book Ursula, Whitaker’s latest work similarly investigates the rich and estranging sensory potential of silhouettes and patterns. Working with the same model she collaborated with in Ursula, Whitaker continues to push the human form into alien terrain, at times wrapping the body with highly reflective tape that lends it a robotic quality, or draping it with aluminum tubing that appears like an ersatz life support system. Increasing the size of the work while depicting more of the model’s body, Whitaker forces us to encounter the figure, sometimes veiled in patterned shadow and always completely isolated, on a scale of equal footing. Yet increasing the size of the works to human scale has the paradoxical effect of widening the distance between the figure in her lonely, futuristic world, and our own quotidian, much less Technicolor reality.
Hannah WHITAKER: Shadow Detail
Past exhibition
