Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic and author based in Los Angeles. Her fine art & design reviews and features have appeared in more than twenty publications. She is currently the LA Managing Editor at Flavorpill.net and a Contributing Editor at Arkrush.com, Artweek and Art Ltd.
Gina Osterloh’s serial C-print photographs and digital videos are large-scale, brightly colored affairs based on semi-performative tableaux vivants. They feature the artist herself posing inside intimate, stylized and relatively lo-tech dioramas: in a retro pants suit over-emoting against a painted sunset backdrop; standing jauntily in a tropical natural history museum botanical vignette. Her face is consistently obscured by camera angle or by her own long dark hair, and this ambiguousness and ambivalence jostles against the specificity in the sparse staging of her backdrops. And staging is the operative word in Osterloh’s work; her transparent, starched artifice putting one in mind of Umberto Eco’s impressions of natural history museums in Travels in Hyperreality, “Primarily, the diorama aims to establish itself as a substitute for reality, as something even more real…”
The video project All City expands and animates this dynamic, examining the mechanisms by which individuals construct the identities they present to the world through a series of vignettes and absurd situations. The Porch series shows her collapsed in a garden chair on a tarpaper roof, taking in the obstructed view of a darkened neighborhood. Sharing this view by looking over her head adds nothing to clarify the physical context; we are all gazing wearily into the dark together. In another C-print, she kneels in an eponymous Turquoise Room and seems to vomit out bilious clouds of bright pink crepe paper. Is it a cynical comment on the unpleasant paroxysms of the creative process or a searing indictment of the glamorization of body dysmorphia? With the wicked pleasure of Osterloh’s pictures in evidence, there is no real need to choose.
