Margi Geerlinks at Stefan Stux - New York

Without substantially raising the bar on the gee-whiz genre of digital morphing, Dutch photographer Margi Geerlinks alters the subjects of her large-format color photographs to represent a world of age fantasies. For her second solo at Stux, she merges physical attributes of youth and maturity, digitally adapting her subjects in search of the one condition within the other, replicating the appearance of the elastic phenomena that allow the human hide to grow, mature and eventually collapse onto its own armature.

Varied in their degrees of subtlety and success, these images attempt to develop a life imagined, a kind of simplistic, childlike make-believe of what constitutes "grown up." In the tidy playroom interior of Nails (2001-02), a young girl expresses grown-up rapture as a friend applies scarlet enamel to the long fingernails of her hand, which is that of an adult woman. Dressed in an oversize T-shirt, the life-size, tousled toddler of Young Boy (2001-02) reveals a grown man's pelted chest beneath the fabric of his shirt. In somewhat analogous paired images of the before-and-after sort, the subject of Diptych: Young Lady I & Young Lady II (2001) crochets a breast-shaped doily. In a homey transformation, she wills herself one step closer to the woman she promises to become by seeming to tat it to her bare chest. At the opposite end of Geerlinks's generational musing, the handsome woman of a certain age in Venus (2001) serenely polishes the shell of a nautilus that resembles a youthful breast and recalls her namesake's birthplace in the sea.

Geerlinks also exhibited more specifically Surrealist photographs, with further references to the attributes of myth. The beautiful nude women who languorously sleep in More than Perfect II and More than Perfect III (both 2001) are each adorned with sensual, supernumerary lips placed on their calves, hips, knees and arms. These recall the aggressive decorative program of vaginal shapes deployed by Hannah Wilke in her "Starifiction Object" series (1974-82). Evoking the myth of Pygmalion, a woman portrayed as a sightless sculptor in Blind Vision (2001) brings to life a Napoleonic man of clay who responds to the touch of her modeling by opening one seeing eye. In a vaguely camp image called The Queen (2001), the bust of a woman resembling Joyce Carol Oates minus the glasses occupies a Daliesque shop-window sort of landscape; she wears a jeweled collar and gazes beyond a field of gems mounted for display. Geerlinks suggests no moral valence in these images; she seems to hold back from any cautionary interpretation of her fables.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group