Presented in the ICA’s Project Space, this exhibition continues the museum’s tradition of exhibiting the work of talented emerging artists. Justine Kurland’s photographs are about adolescence, awkwardness, girls, the American landscape, secrets, and quiet, private dreams of community that hide behind tough exteriors and blank faces. Relatively large-scale, and often theatrically staged, Kurland’s images position their subjects hanging out together in forsaken corners of forgotten fields, forests, highway underpasses, lakes and beaches. Her landscapes and her figures are analogies of each other, in-between spaces where identity and function have not yet been fixed or have begun to slip ambiguously into freedom. Recent work considers community more generally, focusing on present-day communes and people united by a choice to live “off-the-grid.”
Justine Kurland