The Brooklyn Rail

Jenny Calivas’s exhibition Self-Portraits While Buried, now on view at Yancey Richardson, consists of six 50 by 40-inch black-and-white prints that Calivas made between 2019 and 2021. These photographs depict a body—the artist’s—almost completely buried under a mound of dry sand or gooey tidal muck. In each one, we can’t help but notice the defiant fist which seems to erupt from the mounded earth. The clenched hand is squeezing a long pneumatic cable release, which is attached to the camera, which exposes the negative, which some years later will be printed and framed and hung on the gallery wall.

In a Zoom conversation at the gallery, Calivas described her compulsion to photograph along the coast of southern Maine, the beaches of her youth. To work in familiar landscapes is a common gambit for many photographers. What is uncommon here is not that Calivas returned to Maine, but that she buried herself in order to stage her fierce but vulnerable self-portraits.

Every photograph in the series appears to have been made in hazy late afternoon sunlight—Calivas is clearly very particular about the quality of light in her work. During the Zoom conversation, Calivas described how, although buried, she could determine the moment the sun had come out by the sudden warmth of the sand covering her. It was as if she herself were light sensitive.

Calivas used a 4x5 inch film camera on a tripod to make the photographs included in Self-Portraits While Buried. Because the 4x5 produces a highly detailed negative, we can see every grain of sand covering Calivas’s body. In all six photographs in the show, Calivas positioned her camera high up, so that the entire embossed pattern her body makes in the sand would be in the frame.

Calivas’s work is not without precedent. As many have noted, Ana Mendieta, the Cuban American performance artist, sculptor, painter, and video artist also buried herself as part of her performance work. But Mendieta’s program was radically different from Calivas’s. Mendieta saw herself becoming one with nature. Calivas’s photographs are more ironic and multivalent. Their associations range from life to death, from gestating in the womb to being buried alive. Calivas is both the observer and the observed, the photographer and the model, the subject and the object.

Another antecedent, Anne Collier, in the press release for her current show at Anton Kern Gallery, describes her work as a kind of “deflected self-portraiture.” The same could be said about Calivas’s Self-Portraits While Buried. A photographer like Calivas, Collier often assumes dual positions within a single photograph, although not always simultaneously. In her canonical “Developing” series, a photograph of a photograph of Collier’s eye resting poignantly in a black photo tray creates a distance between the viewer and the subject of the image. Unlike Calivas’s work, which depends on simultaneity and proximity, Collier’s “Developing” prints are by necessity made in two phases: First the initial photograph of Collier’s eye is taken (by her or someone else) and then after that photograph is developed and printed, she takes a second photograph of the photograph of her own eye.

Calivas, by contrast, literally breaks new ground in the works that make up Self-Portraits While Buried. In #5 (2021) we stand at her feet and look down on white beach sand cracking over her body as her right hand squeezes the cable release. Apart from her hand only her nostrils are visible. The photograph suggests an image from a horror film, someone rising from the earth after having been buried alive.

On a more formal level the S-curves made by her cable release as it snakes down and out of the frame mimic the wave of hairline cracks along the left side of Calivas’s body. In all of her photographs the cable release is prominent but it bisects each photograph differently—here it repeats pictorial elements from elsewhere in the image. In other works it looks like a cable to a speaker, or as Whitney Hubbs has noted, an old-fashioned telephone cord. Is she singing to us or calling 911?

In some of the photographs Calivas appears to be emerging from the earth. In #11 (2021) she is transformed into a rotting body, covered with barnacles. The work recalls Walker Evans’s 1936 photograph Child’s Grave, Hale County, Alabama. It also reminds us of Sherrie Levine’s appropriation of the same Evans picture. Only Calivas’s left hand clutching the cable lease lets us know that we are not looking at a dead body, that this is a performance, and that somehow there is a woman breathing under all that muck.

In #14 (2021) Calivas is partially submerged in murky, shallow water. A cross between a mermaid and a beast emerging from the sea, she has spread her legs. It is a very sexual image but perhaps the most sexual part of the photograph is Calivas’s partially exposed foot. Its vivid nakedness is almost shocking.

In #1 (2021), the lede image for the exhibition, we see more of Calivas. No longer a corpse or a monstrous mermaid, she is now partially exposed with her dark hair spread above her head and the lower half of her face emerging from beneath the sand. Both of her arms are also revealed, and we see that she is wearing a t-shirt. One might assume from some of the other photographs that she is nude—with all the implications, art historical and otherwise, that that brings. But in #1 she is dressed and she could be seen as a powerful woman trying to control her own image.

Much has been written about the camera as an instrument that subjects women to a controlling gaze. In Calivas’s case, not only is she able to hide from that gaze, but as the photographer she is also the one doing the looking. Paradoxically she is in total darkness when she squeezes the cable release. Maybe she is echoing the darkness of analog photography. Or maybe she also likes giving up control.