Dana Hoey

For more than 20 years, the photographer Dana Hoey (born 1966) has explored what it means to be female. Using both staged and directed photography, her meticulously constructed pictures often combine the sunny daylight and saturated color of commercial, digitally enhanced film stock with the iconography and framing of religious painting. Her early work claims influences as diverse as Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa” and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and reveals a fascination with corrupted idealism and the power of heedless actions. More recently, Hoey has explored scenarios in which older women play central roles and typically female activities take on elevated status. In her latest pictures, resin casts of her own and friends’ bodies, found sculptures and plastic tarps serve as stand-ins for human subjects. The Phantom Sex is the first comprehensive overview of this prominent female photographer in more than ten years.

Through five photographic styles—commercial product shot, scientific photo, portrait and epic narrative—New York artist Dana Hoey documents a world of primitive living conditions, under five different weather conditions: ash, freeze, thaw, flood and drought. Instruments of survival, such as the flashlight and the compass, populate these extreme situations.