Deana Lawson’s surveillance and colour commune in New York

There exists a peculiar intimacy in the spaces where we are watched without knowing we are watched. Deana Lawson’s new body of work, presented at Gagosian’s Chelsea location, turns her lens toward the surveillance infrastructure embedded within American beauty supply stores, those fluorescent lit temples where observation becomes an unspoken transaction between commerce and identity.

The series, titled “Edge Control,” takes its name from a product category ubiquitous in these establishments, yet the work reaches far deeper into questions of gaze, power and the subtle ways in which we are monitored and categorised. Lawson’s photographs capture these spaces and their occupants with an unflinching clarity, rendering visible the invisible systems that govern how we move through public life. The new holograms, conceived as an extension of this visual inquiry, channel the science fiction dystopias of Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly,” allowing the work to slip between documentary and the speculative, between the present and an imagined future where surveillance becomes ever more intangible.

What distinguishes this exhibition, however, is Lawson’s parallel assertion about colour itself. Her large scale photographs of domestic interiors insist upon the validity of hues that contemporary visual culture has largely abandoned. Deep greens suggest the interior worlds of previous generations. Mauves whisper of a softer sensibility. Yellows and browns, those earthy, unfashionable tones, become radical choices in a moment of flattened, homogenised aesthetics. In Lawson’s hands, these colours are not nostalgic; they are urgent. They represent a refusal of the visual impoverishment she perceives as endemic to our time.

The work operates across multiple registers simultaneously. There is the sociological rigour of her investigation into surveillance and racial surveillance specifically. There is the formal sophistication of her photographic technique. And there is something more elusive: a tenderness toward the spaces and people she photographs, a recognition of their dignity and complexity that refuses easy moralising or spectacle.

The holograms introduce a ghostly, spectral dimension to this enquiry, as though the act of observation itself might become immaterial, present but not quite graspable. They suggest surveillance as something that exceeds the optical, something that haunts the spaces Lawson documents.

This exhibition represents a significant moment in the artist’s practice, where her longstanding concerns about representation, race and the constructed nature of identity fold into a more expansive meditation on how we see and are seen, and on the necessity of local colour, local texture, local specificity in a world increasingly drained of such particularity.

Imagery courtesy of Gagosian (@gagosian).