There is one moment that affected what I choose to point my camera at today. It was when I was in my early 20’s and living in Oakland, California. I was shopping at a department store and I looked around me and noticed that all the African American women in the store had had their naturally curly hair straightened and all the Caucasian women, including myself, had had their naturally straight hair permanently curled. I wondered why this was. Was this out of curiosity or dissatisfaction? Do we have the urge to know what life would be like if we were different from who we really are? Are we looking for different reactions or do we think that the grass will be greener on the other side of the fence? —Alice Shaw

The announcement for Alice Shaw’s current exhibition, wryly titled A Group Show, has some visual qualities familiar to those who have seen her work: a kind of snap-shot immediacy, portraying subject matter that reflects on the incongruities/disjunctions of urban life, printed in color and pinned to the wall. This picture, though, is yet another example of the artist’s dry sense of humor, in that it is the only one of its kind in a show which otherwise consists of two bodies of work seemingly as different from each other as they are from the aforementioned color print. In terms of content, the works on view at Gallery 16 have a clear relationship to Shaw’s previous explorations with aspects of autobiography/self-portraiture. But in terms of how these questions about the self are being asked, she throws our expectations into diverging directions so thoroughly that a kind of (pleasurable) visual whiplash ensues.

To make the ten pairs of images titled “Opposites,” Shaw sought a physical counterpart to her own attributes as “a small white middle-aged woman who often feels that I have more male traits than female traits.” This reverse-doppelganger turns out to be a tall teenaged African American transsexual who lives in Richmond. Each diptych shows Shaw and her “double” striking similar poses, in similar states of undress or nudity, in various rooms of a high-ceilinged Victorian-era interior. Brilliant sunlight pours in the window, framing her figure or his in underwear and heels, crouched, contrapposto, or just reclining.

These relatively small, straightforward black and white images—endearing, haunting, disturbing and funny in turns—ask so many questions that it’s hard to know where to begin. In this curious contest of identity, what do such poses mean? And what’s the effect of gender, race, sexuality and socio-cultural context on that meaning? The First Question of photography even comes to mind here: What do we see, and what do we think we see? Looking at Shaw, I found myself wondering who my own Other might be.

The other series presented in this show follows a different thread of Shaw’s previous explorations, in a way—of her identity as Alice, the famous heroine of books about a little girl who went through the looking glass by Charles Dodgeson, aka. Lewis Carroll. Shaw noted a distinct similarity between Dodgeson’s photographs of little girls and E.J. Bellocq’s portrais of prostitutes in New Orleans, and has essentially brought together rhyming pairs of these images, combining them into lenticular photographs. (For those not familiar with this term, which included me, it’s the name for those pictures most commonly seen on toys or novelties that display one image from one angle and a second from a slightly different view.) As Shaw rightly intuited, it wouldn’t work to just put these pictures side by side. By essentially making them into two views of the same image, Shaw extends her interrogation to questions about what we really know about the past through such pictures, since we project our own social and cultural mores on them, or about the relationship between photographer and subject. As in the diptychs of Shaw and her Opposite across the room, Bellocq’s women and Dodgeson’s little girls sit or stand in similar poses. For whatever it’s worth,
the girls’ gestures or settings are sometimes more sexually charged than those of the women, who seem cheerful and far more relaxed than their little counterparts.

Each lenticular pair of images begins to create a narrative, whether of time passing— Dodgeson’s pictures date from the late 1800’s; Bellocq’s from the 1920s -- or of hidden memories, revealed by the slightest backwards shift of the observer’s position. The tumult and change characteristic of that turbulent period, as one century shifted to another, is familiar to us today. Thinking about Shaw’s work, I remembered another fin de siecle artist: Paul Gauguin, who yearned to find his Other Self through the mirror of so-called primitive culture. The title of his masterwork of 1897 is in the form of three questions that seem as appropriate now as they did then, especially in the context of Shaw’s thoughtful pictures: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?