Figments and Phantoms

Figments and phantoms exist in our imaginations, but artists can bring them to life.

Fragmented, distorted, or noticeably absent, the body haunts the work in this exhibition. Artists depict the human figure as uncanny and strange. Hans Breder uses mirrors to create unsettling arrangements of limbs and Victo Obsatz employs double exposure to depict Marcel Duchamp with two faces. Kiki Smith repurposes an antique 360-degree landscape camera to capture a distorted and flattened vision of her body. Laura Aguilar poses within the desolate landscape of Joshua Tree while Cindy Sherman costumes herself as a cinematic femme fatale separated from her story.

Banal spaces are transformed into disconcerting environments suffused with the sense of a lost presence in Rachel Cox’s oblique image of a funeral home flower arrangement and Alec Soth’s desolate representation of a hotel at Niagra Falls. Andy Warhol’s foreboding empty electric chairs wait for their next victim as Mitchell Squire’s firing range dummies stand in for lives lost to police violence. Seen together, these artists propose a redefinition of portraiture in which bodies are transformed, entering the realm of figments and phantoms.

Kiki Smith (American, born 1954)
My Blue Lake, 1995
Photogravure and lithograph on paper
Des Moines Art Center’s Louise Noun Collection of Art by Women, 1995.64
Photo Credit: Rich Sanders, Des Moines