Deana Lawson
Gagosian is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of works by Deana Lawson. Opening on September 10 at 541 West 24th Street in New York, the exhibition of mirror-framed photographs and holograms engages issues of personhood, surveillance, and control.
Lawson debuts selections from Edge Control, a series 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. According to Lawson, “the aesthetic of surveillance imagery—deep-horizon blues and greens—opened my thoughts to an alien view of the supply chain, and its final landing point in the familiar beauty stores that I often frequent.” The pictures are framed with luminous black mirrors, underscoring both their reverence and their futurity. The work neither condemns nor valorizes alleged acts of petty theft, but instead foregrounds the implications of agency and transformative potential of beauty products within our late capitalist society.