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NEW YORK
JUSTINE KURLAND
GORNEY BRAVIN & LEE
Art-world cliques are mixed blessings. On the ascendant, a group of artists closely linked by medium, style, and subject, as well as by the institutions where they study and exhibit, can quickly gain an aesthetic cohesiveness harder for mavericks to establish. Once the clique has peaked, however, such identifications stale, propping up work that fails on its own terms and hampering new assessments even when the work succeeds. Justine Kurland's recent exhibition vaulted into the freshly intriguing category. So how to parse this project that owes much to, yet substantially transforms, its template?
In the five years since she received her MFA from the Yale photography program, Kurland's all-girl universe has been defined in relation to the careers of fellow alumnae Anna Gaskell, Dana Hoey, and Jenny Gage, all of whom pursue in various ways the theatrical, psychosexual, advertising- and fashion-inflected tableaux favored by the program's...