Photo exhibit reveals more the longer you look

At first glance, the photographs and films in a new show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art seem simple. On closer examination, they may actually seem a bit of a mess. But the images in "Image Model Muse" are carefully constructed, and very charged.

Sara Cwynar started simply as she talked about her images being installed in a gallery at the institute.

"So these are photographs of my friend Tracy, who is kind of the muse of the title of the show, which is called 'Image Model Muse,'" she said.

Cwynar said she's been photographing Tracy for about 10 years. Her pieces are large portraits of the young Asian woman, who stares ambiguously out of the pictures. Her disconcerting expressions leave viewers uncomfortable. Is she accusing someone of something? Or looking for help? Or is she just bored? No matter what, it's hard to look away.

Cwynar stood in front of one called "Tracy (Grid 1)," in which her friend is lying across a huge color sample grid draped across the entire image.

"She is wearing her own clothes and she is in control of her image," Cwynar said. "And she is posing in this sort of reworking of a classic '50s studio portrait. But I think she does it kind of ironically."

And that irony is just the beginning, said curator Gabe Ritter. This, like all the images in the show, keeps revealing more the longer you look.

"Initially it looks like a young woman in front of a backdrop, and it's a studio photograph," he said. "But then you start to realize there are things that are either amiss, or that give away the 'constructedness' of the photo itself."

Because for all their apparent informality, Sara Cwynar's works are carefully constructed. Ritter pointed to the fact that Tracy is Asian, and posed in a way women are often portrayed in classical paintings.

"Is this a face that we see represented in museums all the time?" he asked. "And if you even have to start to think about that, then the answer is probably no. And then you maybe start to ask yourself, then why?"

And then Cwynar ups the ante. Some of her pictures of Tracy are crowded with objects: jewelry boxes, cosmetics, photographs of other women, some of them so faded they could be decades old.

At first glance they appear to be piled haphazardly on the image, but Cwynar carefully suspends them between plates of glass. They are both part of the image of Tracy and separate. We are used to seeing elements added to a photograph through digital technology nowadays, but the reality of these images is unsettling.

"It creates a kind of strange feeling that you wouldn't get if you were just looking at the objects kind of documented, or placed there in Photoshop. None of it is Photoshopped. It's all kind of as it was," she said.

The things placed in the photographs become a flood in Cwynar's movies. There are three in the institute show. They examine the detritus swirling around us, objects once coveted and then cast aside. Ritter said the effect is emblematic of the life we all live nowadays.

"There is this kind of onslaught of visual material, that we are constantly wading through," he said. "And also, what does that maybe start to tell us about ourselves and how we are being maybe conditioned to see things, to live with things?"

It's hard to take it all in. But that, said Sara Cwynar, is kind of the point.

"I am trying to get the sense of so many things coming at you all the time, and you can kind of grab onto one thing, but a hundred more have gone by while you were like looking at the one," she said. "So I am really trying to create a sense of the overwhelming amount of things that there are to look at and also the kind of endless choices we have to make."

"Image Model Muse" is ultimately about a lot of things: women's lives, modern culture, and questions — the endless questions that are never fully answered.