At the Abbey
By Jason Murison
Elzay
In this age of media frenzies, media circuses, and all of their reality television offshoots, it is hard to find a group of people not exposed to our mob rule society. Even the Amish have their own show. Catholic nuns or sisters, though, have somehow slipped the spotlight. Michelle Elzay’s first solo show in New York (later traveling to Miami) cloaks itself as a document of the cloistered nuns of St. Marie du Maumont abbey in France. Fifty-one nuns have been photographed in the style of the yearbook picture, their faces cropped and framed in identical dimensions; they patiently sit for the camera, clothed in habit and frock with minimal expression. The press release statement keeps the talk short, equating Elzay’s work to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s minimal photographs of mundane, never-ending water towers. As the curator Casey Ruble points out, it is within the nuns’ expression that we see the "private world of these women, a world closed off in many ways from the rest of society". But what can we make of this private world? It is easy to see that Elzay is protecting the innocence of her subjects from art world interpretations (like this one); however, although Elzay’s format is simple, her subjects inspire more than a nonchalant glance. Ultimately what is left for the viewer has been placed in the hands of her subject.
Elzay has teased out the nuns’ desire to be seen, and it is clear that she is photographing the human subject – rather than an object. The nuns’ reactions to the camera seem pure, unmanipulated. They are not directed and they are not seducing the camera like some advertisement from a monthly fashion magazine. There is no extroverted sexuality, no flirt evident. Their sexuality, in fact, is missing. It is either absent or repressed into unknown depths. Elzay’s photos are the polar opposite of work like that of Mathew Barney. They do, however, share a common concentration on the fa�ade of sexuality. Barney, who takes the outside of the human body as minimal, looks and fantasizes about the actions of the inside, furiously obsessing with the cartoon creatures inside his scrotum sack who fly in luxury zeppelins and crash-up Chryslers. Elzay shows the exterior, a group of women who are introverted, whose sexuality is a cipher. This is not to say that these women are asexual, but that their eyes and expressions give only small hints of the myriad of secrets that may lie beneath their habits. It is a long way from the work of Carolee Schneemann, as is (we can only hope) daily life at the abbey.
The exhibition is housed at Fordham University’s Manhattan campus. Fordham’s new storage container-sized fish tank of a gallery is situated between reception desk and student center. A glass wall the length of the gallery separates the portraits of the nuns from the university students who endlessly bustle through the tunnel-like hallway. And what do twenty-something students ceaselessly talk and think about? Sex. Ironically, the quiet gallery is the new cloister. The nuns of St. Marie du Maumont are two steps behind, once again closed off from modern society.
