Paula Cooper Gallery is delighted to present new video and photographic works by London-based artist Carey Young, including the US debut of Appearance (2023), her ambitious forty-nine-minute silent video featuring female judges. First seen in the artist’s major, critically acclaimed one-person exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in 2023, Appearance expands Young’s twenty-year investigation of the law.

Revisiting Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, Young invited fifteen British judges to pose one by one, seated in a judicial chair in a stark white film studio. Young’s sitters include two UK Supreme Court judges; the UK’s youngest ever female judge, now aged thirty-seven; and the UK’s only trans female judge. Close-up shots linger on an expressive range of sartorial choices: power heels, a hijab, gold-trimmed finery, dyed-blue hair, an afro, or the frayed edges of a robe threadbare from years of service. The judges defy the stereotypes of judicial identity and Young examines the trappings of their authority, her close-ups evoking their personalities, emotions, and cultural or ethnic heritage. Presented on a grand scale, Appearance explores the power relations between judge and camera and ideas of judgement between artist, judge, and viewer, while deftly proposing an alternative world of absolute female authority.

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