Holly Wright Challenges Our Sense of Vanity
At the Fralin Museum of Art, photographer Holly Wright reduces her poet laureate husband to a mouthpiece, and asks her subjects to think upon their own deaths.
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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.”
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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: Vanitycontinues at the Fralin Museum of Art through January 5, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Hannah Cattarin and M. Jordan Love.
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