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66

GREGORY CREWDSON (American, b. 1962) UNTITLED signed, editioned and dated

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GREGORY CREWDSON (American, b. 1962) UNTITLED signed, editioned and dated
GREGORY CREWDSON (American, b. 1962) UNTITLED signed, editioned and dated "Gregory Crewdson, 1/2 AP, 1992" in blue ink on verso dye-transfer print 18 1/4 x 22 1/4 in. (46.4 x 56.5 cm) paper: 20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm) 1992 this print is the first of 2 artist's proofs from the NATURAL WONDER series PROVENANCE Ruth Bloom Gallery, LOS ANGELES Private Collection, LOS ANGELES LITERATURE Collier Schorr, "Close Encounters: Collier Schorr on Gregory Crewdson," FRIEZE, New York, March/April 1995, pp. 44-47, p. 44 (illustrated) Bradford Morrow and Carcey Steinke, DREAM OF LIFE: PHOTOGRAPHS BY GREGORY CREWDSON, Salamanca, 1999, p. 45 (illustrated) "In all my photographs I'm very much interested in creating tensions; between domesticity and nature, the normal and the paranormal, or artifice and reality, or what's familiar and what's mysterious. We could call that an interest in the uncanny: the terrifying and the familiar. I intentionally ground all these mysterious or unknowable events within a recognizable and iconic situation, which is the domestic American landscape. Ultimately, I would describe myself as an American realist landscape photographer. Despite the artifice in the pictures, I'm not interested in revealing the production as much as creating a believable or credible world" (Crewdson interview with Bradford Morrow, published in BOMB magazine, Fall 1997). Gregory Crewdson's NATURAL WONDER series (1992-1997) consists of painstakingly crafted dioramas created in his 20 x 20 x 10 foot studio. Everything is fabricated: the houses, the bizarre flora and fauna, the lighting, and each image took approximately 5 to 6 weeks to construct. These "psycho-dioramas" developed out of Crewdson's childhood fascination with the elaborate dioramas displayed at the American Museum of Natural History. The images evoke a sense of claustrophobia even before we are told they are constructed within a studio. The suburbia of the '50s, '60s and '70s, "the jewel of the white male heterosexual" (Schorr, p. 46), today is dwindling and yet the hysteria and mass migration to these suburbs was a crucial part of the artist's growth. Although Crewdson never lived in the suburbs himself, his awe of the mysterious landscape has allowed him to develop his own psychological version of them. The artificiality seems an outgrowth of the artist's generational experience when "the manmade held firm over the natural" (Homes, "Dream of Life: Gregory Crewdson," ARTFORUM, April 1993, p. 72). We feel as though we are voyeurs, just like the fox, watching these eery, yet universally familiar homes.
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