Natural Wonder, (1991-1997)
Constructing Small Worlds
AFTER COMPLETING MY MFA at Yale in 1988, I found myself not quite knowing what to do next. I was having the kind of existential crisis that isn’t entirely unusual for someone just finishing school. I didn’t really have a place to live, and rather than go back to Brooklyn, I decided to move into my parents’ cabin in Becket, MA for a while. I got a job as a waiter in a nearby town.
I knew I wanted to reinvent my work. I was influenced by postmodern artists that I greatly admired such as Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, James Casebere, and others. But also, in a striking way, I was driven by how much the opening of David Lynch’s masterpiece Blue Velvet had inspired me and had opened my eyes — featuring domestic life pitted against nature, exposing the dark and subversive elements existing just below the surface of things.
Not knowing quite what I was doing or how to even begin, I spent the entire summer making dirt piles in the yard — small mounds, the beginnings of landscapes and scenes, but so abstract they didn’t add up to anything yet. In retrospect, it seems completely irrational, but for whatever reason, it’s what I needed to do. I made photographic studies, just beginning to explore sculptural elements, how they worked with light. As the weeks went by, I introduced worms, and bugs, and miniature picket fences. It was obsessive, and it was only starting to make sense to me. I never even developed any of the film from those early exercises.
Fall came, and it started getting cold outside. I couldn’t work in the yard anymore, so I made the guest bedroom into a make-shift studio. This move actually forced me to think about what I was doing in a more intentional and focused way. I started working on a tabletop diorama, something that took shape as a more fully-realized idea for a picture. The resulting photograph would eventually be included in Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, a 1991 group show at MoMA curated by Peter Galassi. This was a huge affirmation, and gave me the confidence to continue with the dioramas, and really put myself fully into making an entire body of work in that vein. Eventually, I titled it Natural Wonder.
Meanwhile, I had moved a couple times. At one point, I had a studio in a mill building in Housatonic, MA, but then ultimately I settled into a studio in Brooklyn. Between 1991 and 1997, I made probably around 50 pictures employing tabletop dioramas. The process became more refined, and more elaborate, involving miniature houses built to scale, set against painted backgrounds, incorporating taxidermy, mutated vegetables, human hair (my own,) and even casts of my legs, arms, and hands. Toward the end, the pictures became more macabre, and were exploring the line between beauty and repulsion. At some point, I felt I had worked through my obsessive impulse to construct these miniature worlds, and had resolved this chapter of my artistic trajectory.
And around 1996, I started to again think again about what was next.
This piece is the second in a multi-part series commemorating the opening of Gregory Crewdson: Retrospektive, at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria. The exhibition runs May 29-Sept. 8, 2024. You can find more information here.
The Crewdson Trail Log is edited and written by Juliane Hiam, in collaboration with Gregory, based on his words and stories.
Beautiful.
Thank you for being such a great inspiration