Sharon Mizota is a Los Angeles-based art critic and writer whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Wired.com, ARTnews and other publications. She is a co-author of Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations in Asian American Art.
At first, Carrie Yury's photographic diptychs of young women in their skivvies recall American Apparel advertisements, or Scarlett Johansson's panty-clad ennui in Lost in Translation. The women recline casually on beds or couches, presenting their bodies while averting their gaze. Enigmatically titled More, the series reiterates a now-familiar female image: frankly sexual, ensconced in middlebrow décor, with a shiver of voyeurism. Yury attempts to trouble this stereotype by disrupting its typically seamless surface.
Photographed at different moments and angles, the halves of each diptych combine to form figures that are both monstrous and modern. In the left frame of More (Diptych #2), a woman lies on her stomach, exposing her back and a sliver of breast. On the right, the view abruptly cuts to a frontal shot of her crotch in a simple gray panty. The two halves are almost, but not quite aligned, encouraging and interrupting a reading of the image as a single, impossibly twisted body.
Such distortions echo traditional anatomical liberties taken in pursuit of heightened "aesthetic" (read: sexual) display. (Ingres' serpentine La grande odalisque from 1814 comes to mind.) Yury's diptychs exacerbate this objectification, but their cool style and studied ambiguity reveal little else. While her figures' hidden faces suggest introspection, they also deny individuality; the panties are a nod to modesty, but also a tease, promising more than they conceal. At times the work risks devolving into titillation or inertia, but its balance of refusal and acquiescence mirrors the contradictory tropes of contemporary female sexuality.
