On the occasion of Aperture's recent publication of Justine Kurland's Girl Pictures, Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to present online a selection of works from this early series, including six previously unseen pictures from that period.
Envisioned as a photo essay, the artist has conjured short, caption-length stories for each of the works on view. Like the images themselves, Kurland's narratives float between reality and fantasy: a carefully staged world caught in "the spectrum between the perfect and real."
The Girl Pictures were taken as Kurland drove across the United States and span a period of five years between 1997 and 2002. Beginning in New Haven, where she was completing her graduate studies, the photographs cover a range of settings from the dystopian non-place of a roadside truck stop to the dreamlike landscape of an Arcadian meadow. The primary subject of Kurland's pictures, however, are the adolescent runaway girls who inhabit these places, both familiar and uncanny, captured by the artist's camera.