Patty Carroll: Photographs and Messages
Carroll’s work gains its power not from its conception, then, but from its execution. These large Ektacolor prints, 23 inches square, place the figure against a totally black background. The woman, a model Carroll uses as a stand-in for herself, has light skin whose smoothness is accentuated by diffuse lighting. A variety of objects have been placed in front of her face in different positions: strips of bacon come down like hair; sausages are arrayed in rows across her forehead and down her face; pink patterned trim is draped over most of her face like a kitchen valance. The almost grand scale of the prints, their black wooden frames, the inky backgrounds, and the obsessive repetition of the same pose with different objects obscuring the face have a cumulative effect: I found them both starkly beautiful and rather frightening.
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Her hope for the messages, then, is that they come across as universal, but I saw them only as her story, not mine. The photographs spoke to me much more directly. As she states, they deal with the position of women, but the theme of the obliteration of identity is less gendered than it first appears. I could find myself in various versions of the model against a stark black background–not behind kitchen objects but wondering, when feeling isolated and alone, what my place is in the world in the face of the identities I’ve assumed or had imposed on me over the years.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Tea Time/Cabbage Head.
