Meghan Boody

Sandra Gering Gallery, New York
Through October 21

The star of Meghan Boody’s latest work is a little girl from New York’s Upper East Side called PSYCHE. One day, having slipped through the mesh of bourgeois society, she wakes up in a fantastical underground world populated by frogs and elves. There she meets her own alter ego Smut and experiences various transformations.

Our conflicting heroes Psyche and Smut – which is also the title of the series – undertake a journey through the cavernous meanderings of the subconscious. It’s difficult for them to find harmony as they hurtle towards an adolescence awaiting them just around the corner. Boody’s entire oeuvre is striking for her fascination with journeys in the outer limits of the imagination. In earlier works she emphasized the temporal aspect of the journey, as in the series Henry’s Wives which paid homage to the wives of Henry VIII. In contrast, this series depicts various key moments in Psyche’s psychophysical evolution. The little girl is shown smoking for the first time, undergoing her first ‘metamorphoses’ (she grows a tail), and dressing up as a princess.

The thirteen digitally re-worked photomontages in the show depict only certain moments from Psyche’s metamorphosis, but any gaps in the story are bridged by the intense narrative richness of the images. At the bottom of every photo the artist has added a strip of smaller images. These not only show the main characters in different contexts but introduce others to the story, such as animals and flowers. Each photo has a brightly-colored rhyming fairytale printed on it, helping the visitor to understand how the story unfolds.

The end result is the kind of wealth of detail that any self-respecting fairytale should contain. In fact, Boody furnishes the viewer with such a complex web of information that it takes a great effort to understand it in its entirety. What she gives us, however, is nothing less than a perfect imitation of the onslaught of images which the media bombards us with daily.

Despite this communicative faculty, however, Boody’s artificial reality sits rather uncomfortably in its surroundings. The baroque blue resin frames lend an academic appearance to the photographs and heighten the distance between the world represented and that of the viewer.




Micaela Giovannotti
Translation by Rosalind Furness