The Brooklyn Rail

Since the time of the Old Kingdom Pharaohs, artists have been preoccupied with the deeply held fantasy of immortality. Usually, that meant that they were skilled production designers for religious organizations exploiting that fantasy to enable programs of social control. Later, they sought to memorialize themselves and their times in service to a notion of a “history” that could be counted on to remember their names. Recent technological advances have conflated notions of celebrity with immortality. For example, we have social media’s fulfillment of Andy Warhol’s prophecy of short-term fame being distributed to vast populations. Meanwhile, advanced biotechnology comes ever closer to substituting artificial bodies for real ones under the rubrics of “augmentation and enhancement.” This is where Lynn Hershman Leeson’s exhibition About Time becomes relevant. For five decades, her work has explored the themes and ramifications of technologically simulated identities in ways that fuse science fiction, feminism, and social commentary. She has done so in a staggering variety of media including film, performance, and through early photographs from the 1970s and 1980s. Much of that work was based on the imaginary misadventures of a fictional character named Roberta Breitman, who Hershman Leeson has cosplayed for many years since the mid-1970s, well before Cindy Sherman created her "Untitled Film Stills."

About Time includes sixteen recent works created in 2025 as well as a few made earlier. Most of these new pieces represent a departure from earlier efforts that focus on the anxious tension between virtual bodies and real mortality: an emerging concern in these post-pandemic times of vaccine controversy. There is a gamut here, running from (almost) straightforward self-portraits such as Eye for an Eye (2025), an editioned photograph made strange by the superimposition of additional eyes overlaying the bifurcated face of the artist. The other end of the gamut takes the form of large, editioned photographs that pay disquieting homage to Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Works such as Home Companions or Sudden Death (both 2025) feature vaguely defined full-sized figures centrally positioned in tenebrous spaces, looking like unquiet ghosts. They are representations of the angel of death more than any kind of self-portrait.

The fact that most of the photographs are printed on a material called Dibond® accounts for their ethereal, shimmering effect. Dibond® is a three-layer panel composed of two very thin layers of aluminum fused to another sheet of polyurethane, allowing light to reflect back to the viewer though the surface of the photographs. The resulting effect is sparkly-like in a subtle way, not nearly so obvious as that created by lightboxes. But it does create an effect of internal illumination that makes the photographs look angelic or celestial. In many cases, they seem to represent frozen memories more than everyday moments.

Other mixed media works such as Defying Compromise or Defying the Plug (both 2025) are less somber in tone, playing with the disruption and reconsolidation of image fragments articulated in graphite, watercolor, and photography. These works bespeak contingency, manifesting as a playful counterpoint to the other works while intruding tactility into Hershman Leeson’s visual vocabulary.

The key that unlocks all of the work in About Time is found in a custom-made stainless steel refrigerator titled Eternally Yours (2023). It is small, with a glass door allowing the viewer to see a vial and several hypodermic details that seem multiplied because of a mirror placed behind them. The vial is said to contain a serum developed from Hershman Leeson’s DNA by Swiss-based biochemist Thomas Huber, subsequently manufactured in China as indicated by certifying paperwork. Does it have any legitimate therapeutic value? It’s hard to say, but the medical question is moot insofar as this exhibition is concerned, where it functions as a prompt for many of the other works’ meditations on mortality. In Lynn as DNA or I See the Future (both 2025), we see vintage images of the artist as a very young girl hovering like wistful memories in shimmering picture spaces. Other photographic works, such as A Compromised Future (2025) or Self Portrait (2025), feature the purple bottle containing the serum. Like the statue of the Egyptian cat that granted Dorian Gray’s wish for immortality in the 1945 film adaptation of Wilde's novel, it stands mute, keeping its magical powers to itself.