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Image of Arapaho Crazy Society Dancer, from "Dioramas"

Arapaho Crazy Society Dancer, from "Dioramas"
Photograph

1986
6 x 6 in. (15.24 x 15.24 cm)

Jacqueline Thurston (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1939 – )

Object Type: Photograph
Medium and Support: Gelatin silver print on paper
Credit Line: Gift of the artist, in honor of the San Jose Museum of Art's 35th Anniversary
Accession Number: 2003.33.01.17

Exhibition


Artists in Residence: San Jose’s 20th-Century Vanguard, March 11, 2016 - September 18, 2016, New Wing, Second Floor, South Metro A Gallery, San José Museum of Art.

SJMA Label Text


Artists in Residence: San Jose's 20th Century Vanguard (2016)

Jacqueline Thurston began the “Hospital” series to explore human fragility and vulnerability on the cusp of life and death. Through the artist’s eyes, the world of modern medicine and technology becomes alien and surprisingly predatory in nature. Similar in its way of challenging how and why people engage with the visual world, Diorama followed as a series of photographs taken at natural history museums. Thurston purposefully allowed reflections to appear on the glass cases or cropped images so as to leave only strange, barely visible clues.

Each photograph engages a single moment of human experience, either with empathy for patients who undergo difficult treatments, or with the mock wild animal life displayed in glass cases. Despite the startling subject matter, each image has a sense of beauty. Thurston’s carefully constructed compositions reflect common tropes in Northern Renaissance painting such as convex mirrors and foreshortened prostrate figures. With full respect for the patient or encased object, Thurston purposefully positions the camera to bring the absurd into view. A living plant appears next to a woman receiving radiation treatment against a painted background of a mountain range. A taxidermied white pelican watching her young is positioned on real stones with an intricately painted background of more birds. Thurston’s images invite the viewer to look carefully and consider the extraordinary and bizarre power of the human gaze.

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Dimensions
  • Image Dimensions: 6 x 6 in. (15.24 x 15.24 cm)


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