SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Casemore Gallery presents You, the performer, a group exhibition that brings together eight contemporary artists —Sophronia Cook, Jim Goldberg, Todd Hido, Whitney Hubbs, Jim Jocoy, Steve Kahn, Rachelle Mozman Solano, Larry Sultan, and Lindsey White— whose works explore the theatrical impulse embedded in both the act of image-making and the staging of the scenes documented within the frame. Drawing upon the aesthetics of performance, illusion, and mise-en-scène, these artists delve into the personal and collective unconscious, blurring the lines between documentary and fantasy, observer and participant, and fiction and reality.
In his 1960 work Leap into the Void, Yves Klein subverted the notion of photography as a purely documentary medium. His photograph, a staged leap from a Paris rooftop, offered a fantastical image that questioned the relationship between reality and illusion. As curator Mia Fineman writes, Klein’s work “symbolically enacts the leap of faith we make in accepting the truth of any photograph.” This moment marked the beginning of an era in which photography began investigating truth through a conceptual and performative lens.
You, the performer continues this exploration, with works spanning from the 1970s to the present, questioning and playing with the validity of the oft-repeated "quintessential American life" narrative through the use of models, the stage, and acute directorial and editorial interventions. Whether set in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the gated communities of Panama, the streets of Hollywood, a dive bar in San Francisco, or the artist’s studio, these images underscore the shifting and often surreal underpinnings between the self, the other, and the interiors we inhabit—physically and psychologically.
As much about the stage as it is about the characters who perform upon it, this exhibition reveals how easily the boundaries between the two can become porous. The models in the photos of Todd Hido, Larry Sultan, and Rachelle Mozman Solano become fairytale-like femme-fatales, the stars of their own movies unfolding in real-time within the image and in collaboration with the photographer’s investigation of their personal inner subconscious landscape.
Lindsey’s White’s You, the performer, the exhibition's titular piece, allows the viewer to choose whether they want to be the performer or remain part of the audience. Jim Jocoy’s double-exposure plays within a similarly temporal space, as the photographer becomes a bridge between performer and audience, evoking the energy of a performance through the physical abstraction of the scene.
Other artists’ works offer a seemingly “empty” stage scattered with remnants—teddy bears, seashells, mylar curtains, ropes, swaddled organs—prompting the audience to mentally reconstruct an implied narrative. In the works of Steve Kahn, Larry Sultan, and Whitney Hubbs, interior spaces transform into psychological containers. The physicality of the printed image becomes performative in Jim Goldberg’s photograph of a stage curtain, printed on paint-embellished fabric and hung as a curtain, and in Sophronia Cook’s aluminum mold of her studio floor. With the aid of these photographers’ perspectives and directorial embellishments, stages and backdrops morph into characters in their own right.
In an era where image-making is second nature, we find ourselves deeper than ever in Foucault’s epoch of simultaneity, reassessing and redesigning the everyday architecture and backdrops that shape our own lives. The works in You, the performer offer both a reflection and a means of escape from the prescribed “American life”—a portal into alternate dimensions that are, perhaps, more honest depictions of our true feelings about the world.
