Sorry We Missed You

The funhouse is not magic; it is light, reflection, basic physics. Its hall of mirrors deceives and distorts, presenting our own bodies back to us contorted. Rosemary Warren’s work is like the funhouse—that nostalgic spectacle of bending light. She rids the hall of mirrors of its griminess and brings its magical physics into the bright clear light. In Warren’s visual repertoire, a pin-up laughs over her shoulder as she basks with a giant clock on a sandy beach, a contortionist rests her chin on a striped picnic blanket as her painted toes perfunctorily touch the top of her head, the artist’s mother sits casually and confidently with her chin propped on her fist, a contestant on a reality show waxes passionately about her great and unreachable love in a retelling of the myth of Narcissus. In a double exposure, a brown-haired woman looks at once left and right; her eyes seem to merge, and she becomes the mythic cyclops. Warren’s work presents the surreality of the physical world—a circus of light—pairing distortion (of bodies, of our orientation in space, of reality) with a crisp clarity of form.

Like a scientist embracing whimsy, Warren finds joy in her medium and process. In the darkroom, Warren, the alchemist, brews her elixirs—gelatin prints of exquisite, disorienting clarity. Her durational work too thematizes projection but, unlike the photographs, the video installation explodes with color (again as a property of light). Here too she examines entertainment’s distortions without malice; joy and whimsy are never out of reach. Like the funhouse’s hall of mirrors, reality television is a mode both of distortion and entertainment. Yet this description sounds too scientific, for Warren’s work both enacts these mechanics and deploys them allegorically—that is, in order to examine the way women pose. The presentation of self, she contends, is not a quotidian act but as itself a kind of magic. The contortionist performs the funhouse version of you; she is your spectacular doppelgänger.

The funhouse is not magic, but it is magical. It is our own reality not made merely strange but offered up as projected distortions of light and mass for our own visual pleasure. Light itself, Warren’s work suggests, is a property of unknowable magic; it is alchemy.