December 13, 1998 – January 31, 1999
The show presented a selection of photographs from Miranda Lichtenstein’s recent series of work shot at dusk or night in rural and suburban Connecticut. Each photo in the series depicts a single, gracious house in a fantastical, almost haunted fashion. The effect is attained by enhancing the natural lighting with unlikely artificial lighting from Lichtenstein’s automobile head and brake lights, which cast an especially odd and eerie glow. This use of light dramatizes the architecture of the the subject and creates a feeling of isolation and melodrama that invites the viewer to devise a narrative for each scene. The artist references staged images of Hollywood cinematic terror, and her use of this aesthetic sets up interesting dichotomies, such as the real and unreal and the natural and the artificial.
Lichtenstein’s work has been compared with Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, which played on the notions of documentary photography. Lichtenstein’s photographs cause us to examine our own ideas of home, safety, and the illusions that we create in our own minds.
Miranda Lichtenstein earned her Master of Fine Art in Photography at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1993 and now resides in New York, where she was raised. She has shown her work in New York and California at various group exhibitions, and recently had a solo exhibition at the Steffany Martz Gallery in New York.
