CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia — “Vanity” is one of those words freighted with cultural baggage, from the Bible (“all is vanity”) to philosophy (“Vanity is the fear of appearing original,” per Nietzsche) to literature (Ezra Pound’s “Pull down thy vanity”). At an exhibition of photographs by Holly Wright at the Fralin Museum of Art, the word takes on connotations from “vain” to “vanitas.”
Holly Wright: Vanity opens with the titular series of photographs, 10 close-ups of the artist’s hands from 1985 to ’88. Is it vain to photograph one’s hands? Perhaps, but without a nearby wall text, you might be hard-pressed to make out exactly what part of the body you’re looking at. Using various blurring effects, Wright highlights creases, cracks, and folds, transforming them into fleshy abstractions. These can be somewhat unsettling. An image of four fingernails seemingly pressed into skin, for instance, might be read as teeth. Two photos subtitled “Black Hole” feature deep wells of darkness within the tight universe of the hand.
In the 1993 series Poetry, Wright offers contact sheet-like arrangements of photos of the mouth of her husband, Charles Wright, in mid-recitation. In these close-ups, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States Poet Laureate is reduced to, well, a mouthpiece, his lips, sometimes in partial shadow, forming words we cannot hear. Although these stop-action takes can be fascinating, these works certainly “pull down [his] vanity.”
The poet also appeared in another Wright series, True Saints (1980–84), which features portraits of friends and family playing the parts of biblical figures. “My particular interest,” the artist once said of these enactments, “is role-playing and self-images, what is real and what is authentic faking.”
This makes for a nice segue to the third series in the show, Final Portraits (1980–1983). For these full-length studies, Wright asked her subjects to consider how they might greet death — how they would look, what they would wear, etc. In “Vivian and Bob Folkenflik” (1983) the eponymous couple lies side by side, loosely holding hands, ready to meet their maker with what appears to be open-eyed steadfastness. The details pull you in: her sandals, his wrinkled-at-the-knees pants, the leaf pattern of the sheet upon which they lie. For his earthly finale, the Wrights’ son, Luke, chose to arm himself with rifle, hatchet, and knife, his small body stretched out on the ground in a chilling vanitas image of death amidst life.
Holly Wright: Vanity continues at the Fralin Museum of Art through January 5, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Hannah Cattarin and M. Jordan Love.
