PURCHASE, NY.-Acting Out: Invented Melodrama in Contemporary Photography explores significant contemporary photography that features fabricated melodrama, characterized by pathos, over-wrought emotion, moral polarization, nontraditional plotting, and extraordinary events. The exhibition is a lively display of 32 works by 13 artists who investigate melodrama as an aesthetic system of representation influenced by literature, theater, film, media stills, and historic photography.

“The photographs gathered for the exhibition contain all the elements for feature-length, no-holds-barred movies to unfold in the imagination of the viewer,” notes Ms. Edwards. “The contexts of the photographs were preconceived by the photographers, who functioned like directors collaborating with a team of actors and crew. Within these fabrications it is largely the presence of melodrama, a pervasive if under-acknowledged aspect of narrative, that makes the exhibition photographs, and those like them, hit home,” Ms. Edwards says.

Artists in the exhibition include Tina Barney, Purchase College graduate Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Anna Gaskell, Tom Hunter, Simen Johan, Justine Kurland, Laura Letinsky, Sharon Lockhart, Adi Nes, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, and Janina Tschape. Many of the images in the exhibition refer to popular cultural images. The artists combine the initial perception of these images with new implications accumulated over time, and make use of the long-standing language of melodrama to explore and comment on how we create meaning from a single photographic image. The viewer recognizes and relates to the plot lines of these photographs through a familiarity with a range of melodramatic forms.

Systematically manipulating the language of melodrama, the photographs in Acting Out fulfill the requirements for the creation, maintenance, and modulation of emotions. Family life set against a charged atmosphere is typical of Tina Barney’s photographic scenes. Barney transfers private events, such as a perceived fight between a husband and wife, into a public scene. Gregory Crewdson, a Purchase College graduate, uses photography to investigate his own interior life. With a production crew of more than thirty people, Crewdson creates elaborate sets that mimic Hollywood movies and American television programs such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Twilight Zone. Philip-Lorca diCorcia uses dark, isolated settings such as subways, to create powerful emotional backdrops for his essentially banal subjects.

Anna Gaskell’s photographs are uncomfortably reminiscent of some sadistic fairytales that gave rise to the characterization of women as lacking or needing to be fixed. Tom Hunter’s political parables attempt to speak for homeless friends, who are presented in staged photographs depicting a fire destroying a home, or a reaction to an eviction notice. His compositions often mimic masterworks by Vermeer and other painters.

Laura Letinsky brings her camera very close to her subjects, catching them in vulnerable moments of intimacy and silence. The work of Adi Nes reflects on Israel’s mandatory military service and the cultural emphasis on heroic manhood. Overlapping cultural references such as Israeli national icons, Western art masterpieces, and homoerotic literary classics are summoned up to imply the various means whereby Nes’s native country engineers national memory.

Acting Out has been organized and traveled by the University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA. A 50-page color catalogue, distributed by University of Washington Press, accompanies the exhibition, which includes an essay written by Kathleen Edwards. It is for sale in the Neuberger Museum Store. The exhibition has been organized for the Neuberger Museum of Art by Dede Young, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.