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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

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The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

At the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, radiant geodes have been placed in the corners for the safeguarding of Deana Lawson’s exhibition PLANES In this city, the protective quality of crystals is accepted in the same way that lightbulbs are agreed to be sources of light In certain corners, Lawson tacked up numerous 4 x 6 inch glossy prints: snapshots of her own younger self alongside scenes of atrocity, ritual, expedition and celebrity Many of the images were scanned during her expansive research into black visual culture at American libraries The assembled histories could be read as reports from a diasporic cosmology   The collages also serve as the mood boards for Lawson’s own photographs, presented here as framed inkjet prints, each around four feet tall They depict black people of various ages in staged domestic scenes The models are often strangers to the artist and each other; the entwined man and woman in SEAGULLS IN KITCHEN (2017), for example, weren’t previously acquainted, and the brass birds that shadow them on the cinder block wall migrated there for the shoot For WOMAN WITH CHILD (2017), the artist placed her own son alongside another woman as if he were a momentary changeling At first, the images register as intimate family portraits, a testament to Lawson’s ability to disarm her subjects Even the man holding a shotgun defensively in UNCLE MACK (2017) has a softness about his wizened face   In these images, identity is both inscribed on bodies and articulated through their surroundings The interiors, shot in New York, South Africa and LA, appear underprivileged yet regal Motifs recur: parquet flooring, bath towels on sofas, elephant statuettes, grandma curtains (Zadie Smith has averred that ‘paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone’) Certain objects give the impression that other characters have vanished, or perhaps just wait in the wings: matriarchs out shopping, children put to sleep In SOWETO QUEEN (2017), a nude woman crouches on a towel alongside remote controls,

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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poetry

January 2016

Two New Poems

Elena Fanailova

TR. Eugene Ostashevsky

poetry

January 2016

(POEM FOR ZHADAN)   This (my) country will be the death of you Its military mathematics Its secret services...

poetry

January 2012

Tynemouth Lodge

W. N. Herbert

poetry

January 2012

‘Sometimes I go to the tavern and get drunk.          What of it?’                                 Nesimi 1 Bars tend us...

feature

Issue No. 8

Barking From the Margins: On écriture féminine

Lauren Elkin

feature

Issue No. 8

 I. Two moments in May May 2, 2011. The novelists Siri Hustvedt and Céline Curiol are giving a talk...

 

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