Galerie Lelong

Australian artist Rosemary Laing presents the weather series—a body of photographs made in response to current shifts in climate, both global and political, and bearing Laing’s potent, distinctively cinematic vision. weather, her third exhibition at Galerie Lelong, opens to the public on Thursday, February 1st from 6 to 8 pm, and the artist will be present.

Laing employs a highly methodical process and generally works in series, creating detailed, thematic bodies of work large in scale and scope. Photographs of elaborately staged performances and interventions, the images recall film stills and are what the artist calls “distillations of time.” In weather, the human subject is suspended and encircled by a whirlwind of newspaper strips that obscure her figure. The woman’s dress, designed by Laing, was inspired by Victorian-era clothing and represents working women of the 19th century. The images are fraught with energy and tension, as the woman’s body is flung about mid-air, defenseless within her unnatural, uncertain surroundings.

These weather works recall earlier series, including bulletproofglass and flight research. These seminal series depicted women caught in unusual and ambiguous circumstances—unexplained narratives that are open for the viewer’s interpretation. Other works in the weather series take place in Eden, a fishing town in New South Wales, Australia. Sparse and darkly quiet, the haunting images from Eden suggest a paradise both idyllic and defeated. Displacement, human advancement, and the landscape as cultural memory are themes that have pervaded Laing’s work and are conveyed in the weather series as universal and ever-timely.