Courtesy Klompching Gallery, New York. © Elaine Duigenan

Elaine Duigenan, "Damage" (2008). Digital photogram, 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 in.

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

Jeff Koons

Chantal Akerman

Painting: Now and Forever, Part II

Erkka Nissinen

There is No There There

Kerry James Marshall

Peter Saul

John Massey

Bridget Riley

Pipilotti Rist

Thomas Helbig

Armando Andrade Tudela

Gary Hume

Marine Hugonnier

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy EU to Extinguish Lightbulb Art? Pencil of Nature Rare Photography Book Collection Donated to Scripps College Léger Painting Goes Missing From Wellesley College Right as Rhine Photography Week Gets Strong Start at Sotheby’s Art Cologne Announces Daniel Hug as New Director

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Conjuring the formal rigor and appearance of Man Ray’s and László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms of mundane household objects (like paperclips or scissors), are Elaine Duigenan’s digital scans featuring an assortment of similarly banal nylon stockings and hairnets. In her first New York solo show, the British photographer devoted all her focus to just these two items. (Duigenan worked from her own collection of hairnets made between the 1920s and ’50s, some of which are intricately constructed from real human hair.) The subsequent reduction of content teased out the structural qualities of these nostalgic women’s accoutrements. The images from her 2005 stocking series, “nylon,” were cropped in so closely that details such as a crumpled thigh grip or snagged thread became abstract, tidy geometric forms (picture the close-up of a counterstitched, triangular heel, or the gaping oval sheen of a stocking’s opening). Even more engaging in an eerie sort of way is her series from 2008, “Net,” highlighting the crisp, razor-thin black lines of hairnets, which appear to be pressed onto paper with the inky contrast of a drypoint etching. This series offers a Rorschach romp of associations: Nets become jellyfish, a uterus, a heart, or a bird’s wing. With Duigenan’s marvelous handiwork, one innocuous item dropped onto a scanner can resemble either the clean grid of an architectural drawing or a foul clot of wet hair pulled from a drain.

"Elaine Duigenan" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.