NEW YORK, NY.- Sleeping Beauty presents acclaimed visual artist Lydia Panas’ psychologically charged color portraits of women and girls lying down or half-reclined in lush natural settings; a metaphor for the positions girls and women have been placed in historically. Yet, the women and girls Panas photographed on her farm in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, look at the camera and viewer directly, with keen self-awareness. Through Panas' lens their inescapable gazes signal they are working to counter the stereotypical boxes they have been forced into. These women and girls look at us in a way that implies a lack of complicity. In a role reversal from the fairytale, Panas' subjects are wide awake and exude a quiet power.
Coinciding with the book's publication in December, The National Arts Club in New York City will present an in-person artist reception and book signing with Lydia Panas on December 16 at 6pm. Photographs will be on view in the club's Project Space from December 13-18. Other book launch events are scheduled from November 2021 through March 2022.
Sleeping Beauty begins with a spirited poem titled "In Waking Up The Giant Within Sleeping Beauty" by Monae Mallory who graces the book's cover. In it, Mallory expresses both the double standards and inner strengths associated with womanhood. Further context is brought to Panas' work via two insightful essays written by Marina Chao ("Breaking the Spell") and Maggie Jones ("The Awakening").
On the evolution of Panas' work over nearly 30 years, Marina Chao describes Sleeping Beauty as "a collective portrait of psychological womanhood" and "a collective mirror, reflecting back our feelings towards women, our assumptions and expectations of them. The space of these photographs is more gathered in, protected and intimate, than in the artist’s previous bodies of work and has shifted from their idyllic, pastoral surroundings to being unmistakably Edenic. Panas’ women—Panas herself, all of us—are moving on, moving forward, and reclaiming the Garden.”
Maggie Jones shares a personal story about being sexually harassed by a man on a sleeper train when she was 19 which she recalled when viewing one of Panas's photographs. Jones managed to quietly extricate herself from the man, but was filled with shame that her reaction was so slow and muted. “I thought of that night when I saw the photo of Jacque ... Like many of the women in this book, Jacque is on her back, the detritus of fall -- dried grass, brown leaves – around her. But despite the fact she is lying down, she is no one’s victim. She folds her arms across her chest, clenches her hand beneath her shirt sleeve. A small furrow crosses her brow. Her eyes are open and intent. She looks at the viewer with skepticism, wariness.”
Jones concludes, “At 19, I had already come to expect harassment and had digested the message that I should brush it off and move on. Creating a louder response has taken years of fits and starts. Lydia Panas’ photos remind us there is, in fact, no bright shining moment of awakening and speaking out. Instead, we push against gravity, toward a constant, sometimes uneven, process of becoming.”
Critics and curators have lauded Panas' artistic and technical mastery and have noted the intensely affecting gaze of her subjects. Panas has remarked, "while my subjects do in actuality turn their gaze towards me, it's as if at times I turn the camera onto myself, both in the present and back in time." The traditional position of authority is foiled and complicated in these arresting and quietly confrontational portraits.
Lydia Panas is a visual artist working in photography and video. Drawing on a combination of psychoanalysis and feminism, her work looks at identity and what lies below the surface, investigating questions of who we are and what we want to become. Exploring the roles of power and trust on both sides of the camera, she describes what it feels like to be a woman, a human, and the complex range of emotions we feel. Panas' work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Her photographs are represented in public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Palm Springs Art Museum, Allentown Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego, Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, and the Sheldon Museum, among others. Two monographs of her earlier work have been published: Falling from Grace (Conveyor Arts, 2016) and The Mark of Abel (Kehrer Verlag, 2012), which was named a "best coffee table book" by the Daily Beast.
