The Westerns

It looks like it’s going to be Katy Grannan month - with simultaneous shows at Fraenkel, Greenberg Van Doren, and Salon 94. The accolades I presume will come her way will be well deserved for these are some of the strangest and most powerful pictures to come along for a while.

One of the four original Yale girls in the famous 1999 "Another Girl, Another Planet" show, Grannan’s work has revolved around soliciting willing subjects for her psychologically intense constructed portraits. Aside from the technical expertise and tactile sense of the body Grannan brings to each picture, her work has always played with the tension between her own theatricality and the depth of revelation of her subjects.

Grannan has now moved her operation west where referrals led her to Gail and Dale (two middle-aged transsexuals and best friends) and Nicole, a woman clearly on the verge of something very disturbing. It’s Diane Arbus meets Sweeney Todd - a forceful and disturbing vision of a world where the roles people play cover up layers of once-repressed but now exploding emotion.