Civilization and its Discontents

I saw Philippine Hoegen's work for the first time this weekend, at the TEAM gallery in Chelsea. Philippine Hoegen is a 28 year old Dutch photographer. She has been in several well known shows since 1996. Considering how long it usually takes someone to establish herself in the contemporary art world, Hoegen’s fame at 23 would make her something of a child prodigy.

Yet her work reveals a very old soul. Her photos speak of the oppression of a lonely, listless, middle-aged housewife, herded to and fro by the meaningless domestic tasks demanded by her ugly appliances and furnishings.
The daylight is always slanted and weak. The lights used at night are glaringly artificial and miscolored. Philippine Hoegen often poses in the photos, which are always in other people’s houses, chosen for their odd, unfriendly feel. She acts almost “as if” she belongs in that setting, but the setting itself appears too harsh, overprocessed and ugly to be the true home of any human being.

The “as if” quality is one of PH’s main psychological techniques; the knowledge that this is not her real house permits the viewer to add yet one more level of both meaning and distance to the photos. Photos have the pretense of being more “real”, but like a Cindy Sherman of architecture, Hoegen makes each home less real and more of a statement about the nature of not only identity, but identity and place. One of her slide shows at the TEAM gallery was called “Vacancy” and showed how a body, half photographed from odd angles (under the table, from the ceiling, etc.) can be in a room and yet not seem to inhabit it.

Her two most striking pieces this weekend were titled “ Night” and “Inside”. “Inside” was the slide projection of the night-time image of small, domestic backyard, with an eery florescent light glowing above the yard’s locked metal gate.
If you looked closely around the edges of the image, you could see the edges of window. The photo was taken “inside” at night, looking at an outside that was also locked up. The viewer becomes trapped, as if in a series of Chinese puzzle boxes, further and further inside, and less and less able to escape. The photo is seventy percent dark, and the part of the photo with light is a sickly, monochromatic green. These colors, themselves, seem to oppress the viewer.

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