Until 31 July, Eliza Douglas’s first solo exhibition in New York, Ghosts, haunts the walls of Gagosian in New York City. The series superimposes photographs of the artist’s aunt, the controversial independent journalist Leslie Kean, with the social commentary of Douglas’s previous works.
With its complicated layering, in-your-face use of colour, and self-referentiality, Douglas’s art is hard to capture in words. The artist continues a long-term exploration of Mark Fisher’s cultural-material expansion on Derridean hauntology. Her work (often called “meta-art”) questions the bounds of art with its tongue-in-cheek focus on known intellectual properties (Disney characters, comic books, fashion, and more) and presentation of art as a consumable good.
Ghosts concentrates Douglas’s conceptual strength. She captures Kean in both the cold familiarity of David Lynch and the warm distance of Edward Hopper. Kean is the perfect subject. The journalist, who researches UFOs and life after death, is critically acclaimed but controversial, someone perceived as legitimate in what is perceived as a hokey field. Layered with selfies of the artist framed by night’s mysterious phenomena and the recurring motifs of her previous works on consumer culture (like an angry green goblin, crumpled T-shirts, and comic-style onomatopoeia), we are left wondering if art itself is as mysterious and intangible as aliens, or credibility, as ghosts themselves.
The exhibition Ghosts by Eliza Douglas is on view through 31 July at Gagosian Park & 75, 821 Park Avenue, New York City.
