How often we look at something but fail to see it because we think we already know it. Our eyes closing behind lids of expectation and assumption as yet another familiar image of a famous town is paraded before us. Outsiders and a blue collar musician in Woodstock (a theme hanging on the cliff edge of cliché) comes into startling focus and clarity behind the lens of Quawson’s camera for her debut solo exhibition, Pull Back the Shade.

    The first time I saw this body of work I was living in London and Muzi Quawson was a graduate student at the Royal College. I went to see the graduate exhibition and was taken aback to see my old stomping ground (Woodstock) projected onto a wall in some two hundred slides. The story was standard New York: Quawson bumped into a female musician, became friends, and over the course of the following four years committed herself to photographing the woman in all aspects of her life.

Expunging all hype and conceptual banter about capturing the quotidian moments of this woman’s life, these photographs are lush beauties. The golden light of upstate New York illuminates the crisp reality of a rustic new age existence. The photographs themselves have been reproduced for light boxes, which heightens the warmth of the light and color saturating each image.

This body of work is earning Quawson a place in the establishment, so if you’re curious what it takes to raise the stakes, go see her show.

- Charlie Schultz

(*Images, from top to bottom:  Muzi Quawson, Pull Back the Shade, February 21 - March 29, 2008; Yossi Milo Gallery, On Main Street, Kingston, New York, from Pull Back the Shade series, 2006, Duratran photograph in a light box, © Muzi Quawson, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.  Muzi Quawson, Pull Back the Shade, February 21 - March 29, 2008; Yossi Milo Gallery, Creme & Sugar, New York City, New York, from Pull Back the Shade series, 2002, Duratran photograph in a light box, © Muzi Quawson, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.  Muzi Quawson, Pull Back the Shade, February 21 - March 29, 2008; Yossi Milo Gallery, Swimming with Diamonds, Woodstock, New York, from Pull Back the Shade series, 2002, Duratran photograph in a light box, © Muzi Quawson, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York. Muzi Quawson, Pull Back the Shade, February 21 - March 29, 2008; Yossi Milo Gallery, Camper, Upstate New York, New York, from Pull Back the Shade series, 2004, Duratran photograph in a light box, © Muzi Quawson, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.  Muzi Quawson, Pull Back the Shade, February 21 - March 29, 2008; Yossi Milo Gallery, Union City Blues, Brooklyn, New York, from Pull Back the Shade series, 2004, Duratran photograph in a light box, © Muzi Quawson, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.)