Miwa Yanagi at the Hara Museum

Miwa Yanagi created a stir with her "Elevator Girl" series of photographs beginning in 1993. She depicted those identically dressed ornaments of Japanese department stores standing in display cases, riding moving sidewalks to oblivion or lying in decorative pools of blood in their cages of employment. She has continued to address women's roles since then with a series on imagined ideal grandmothers, and now with her black-and-white "Fairy Tales" series, featured in a solo exhibition at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art.

Here, as in the "My Grandmother" series (one of which was shown as a large Lightjet print in the museum's stairwell), ali the parts are played by young girls. To take the adult roles they wear age masks or sport gnarled, arthritic, veiny hands, with no attempt to hide their smooth, childlike arms and legs. The stories represented in the photographs (all gelatin silver prints and dated 2004 and 2005, most a meter square) are often from the Brothers Grimm (Rapunzel), but also Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Match Girl) and other sources. They retain the violence of the Grimm originals and yet are rendered with a casual artifice. Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, is a bloody mess as she clings to her grandmother in the literally unzipped belly of the wolf. Most of the scenes are set within an old, decrepit, European-style house featuring a fireplace and a mural of a barren landscape. Such a landscape also figures in a video installation, Girls in Her Sand (2004, 6 minutes). Viewers stand inside a black circular tent to watch, on a monitor revealed by parted curtains, two girls with ancient faces playing in the sand. They approach a parted black curtain and then run away over the dunes. This tent reappears as headgear in other works, including a 10-minute video, Suna Onna, in which a young girl's whispery voice recounts her grandmother's encounter in childhood with a mysterious and elusive "Sand Woman." The video incorporates costumed outdoor scenes and stagey silhouettes, slow-paced to create a dreamy atmosphere. Sand again appears in an evocative mural-size ink-jet print, Shifting Desert, in which a woman sweeps sand into rippled wavelets on a stone floor.

Yanagi is so effective at establishing this world of little and bigger girls, complete with implications of horror and affection, good and evil, that it's disconcerting to walk out into a world that has men, too. The acting in the photos and videos is mostly wooden, and she never sets up persuasive illusion, yet her relentless imagination carries the viewer away.--Janet Koplos

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