DEANA LAWSON Edge Control_edvc, 2023– Silver halide print © Deana Lawson Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Deana Lawson debuts selections from her series Edge Control, initiated in 2023, in which she reimagines the monitoring of individuals by beauty supply stores throughout the United States. Recontextualizing surveillance stills taped to windows and entryways, she preserves the ways in which these images warp identity and posit a mode of figuration, intervening only to protect the identities of those pictured. The title Edge Control derives from one of the stores’ most frequently stolen products: a gel used to smooth and lay down the baby hairs along women’s and girls’ hairlines, creating a sleek, polished look. The phrase refers to both the gel itself and to systems of control in the surveilled frame,
extending to a broader culture of image-based policing.

The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s recent large-scale photographs taken in
domestic interiors. Figures gaze directly at Lawson’s camera in these highly detailed images, which
draw on the aesthetics of family albums as well as the meticulous compositions and symbolism of
seventeenth-century Dutch paintings.

The exhibition also features new holograms encased in layers of glass. An extension of Edge Control,
these works were inspired in part by Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (1977).

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