FLASH ART, January/ February 2002~Odili Donald Odita

JULIE MOOS
Fredericks Freiser Gallery

The current exhibition of new photographs by Julie Moos at the Fredericks Freiser Gallery clearly stands out as the artist’s most intellectually challenging work to date. Moos displays her technical expertise with elegance and restraint. Her surface colors are rich overall, yet tightly controlled as they stab out intermittently on exposed collars and blouses, or as in the photograph, Martin and Raymond, out of the corner of blood-shot and aged eyes. In this formally subtly and conceptually explosive exhibition, entitled Domestic, Moos examines the complex relationships that develop between domestic servants and their employers.

The set-up in each of the eight photographs is that of homeowner and housekeeper, paired in a straight-ahead and direct manner. In all but one photograph, a Caucasian individual sits next to someone of African descent. The class of each individual is not generally obvious here, which throws things into an interesting slant. We are forced to assume who the housekeeper and the homeowner might be, and unfortunately, our assumption rings true. Suddenly the photographs ask us to acknowledge and confront assumptions we may carry about class and race. Upon further investigation, we learn that the pairs pictured have a story that goes beyond the work. In most cases the housekeepers have worked for and lived with the family of the homeowner for several decades; they may have even raised the homeowner form infancy. We can only guess at the kinds of interactions these people have experienced living together. Certainly, one can conjure up the idea of family. And if historic and disproportionate power relations via class and race have not necessarily been overturned (in all eight photographs on view, the housekeepers/ servants are of African descent), we come away with a sense of a union, if unequal, that has developed over time.

What is most significant about Moos’ work is a world changes not so much on its surface as it does underneath. Beneath the skin of her powerfully static images lies a reality rich with the convoluted history of human interactions. What Julie Moos succeeds at is finding the complexities that exist within a frame where relationships germinate beyond prescribed social models of class and race.