Review: "Beneath The Roses" at the White Cube Gallery

Gregory Crewsdon’s large-scale photographs hang, imposing and unlabelled, in the bare expanse of Hoxton’s White Cube, the only thematic clue coming from the exhibition’s title: the dark underbelly of urban and suburban America, the vicious and viscous horror that hides furtively beneath the neon and brownstones and bucolic idylls of the Midwest.

Each photograph holds a self-contained tableau depicting carefully staged scene’s from American life. As your eyes adjust to the size of each piece, and the abundance of peculiarities within each one, the softest glimmers of a deeper narrative begin to swell. Questions are hung on the myriad details that are packed into the frame. A middle-aged couple stand in their bedroom, the woman’s face frozen in consternation, her moribund husband glaring at the floor; the patio door lies ajar. Elsewhere, a group of teenagers are scattered across a woodland redoubt. The eye focuses on the boy kneeling before a hole, his shirt removed, a length of frayed rope coiled on the ground beside him; he looks furtively at the stout frame of another boy who faces away from the camera. A woman sits in the passenger seat of a car on a twilit street, the tarmac scarred with rainfall. The driver’s seat is empty, the door ajar; her companion fled? In every photograph it seems that the camera has arrived a fraction late, just missing the pivotal event. In close proximity to the images, I found myself helplessly drawn in, and half-expected the actors to start moving; as if these characters existed in a film that I had paused on my VCR. It becomes an infuriating game, trying to piece together the sequence that leads to the moment captured by Crewsdon’s camera; and the dark nature of the material leads of expositions of a fanciful and macabre nature.

The photographs clearly invite comparisons with Edward Hopper’s paintings (though Hopper invests far less symbolism. The colours, reminiscent of Francis Bacon, are vivid and carefully delineated; in one shot, a bright pink camisole stands out against the browns and greens of a backyard post-coital embrace. Yet the images are closer to film stills in both aesthetic and method of production. Crewsdon employed professional actors, lighting designers and cinematographers to realise his visions. The late Eighties preoccupations of David Lynch, when his television series Twin Peaks uncovered the dark secrets of a pastoral town, are reflected in the empty small town streets and lumbering suburban clichés. The children searching through the overgrown skids and train tracks of a suburban town evoke Jeffrey discovering the severed ear in Blue Velvet.

In fact, the repetition and reminiscence of the Lynchian preoccupation – the terror beneath the peremptory normality of suburbia – becomes a little too mundane. We have been down this route before, so many times that the question of what is ‘normal, or perceived to be as such, in American society has ceased to have any relevance. Crewsdon’s images are intriguing to look at, yet they offer a predictably menacing slice of familial discontent that is becoming a little tired. Furthermore, the motifs that appear in several of the photographs – assorted pills scattered across a bedside table, empty liquor bottles – gradually become a little too contrived and provide too much justification.

Still, for stretching the mind’s tendency to string narratives together out of disparate elements, Crewsdon’s exhibition is certainly worth a visit.

Gregory Crewsdons ‘Beneath The Roses’ is on at the White Cube, Hoxton, until May 21st