Deana Lawson's Edge Control Repurposes Shoplifter Surveillance — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Deana Lawson opened "Edge Control" at Gagosian gallery in New York City, on view until October 24, using enlarged surveillance photos of alleged beauty supply store shoplifters as her primary medium.
- The exhibition explicitly engages bell hooks' essay "The Oppositional Gaze," reframing surveillance — historically a tool of racial control originating in slavery — as a site where Black subjects look back at the viewer.
- Gagosian's gallery design surrounds the shoplifter portraits with mirrors, forcing viewers to see themselves looking, while two holograms in the middle of the room reveal Black women's bodies that shift depending on the viewing angle.
- Many beauty supply stores — which predominantly sell Black haircare products in Black neighborhoods but are rarely Black-owned — post low-resolution surveillance images of alleged shoplifters as routine customer warnings.
- Lawson deliberately leaves some shoplifter images blurry or masked, refusing to clarify who is the "criminal" versus the "regular customer," forcing viewers to confront biases she describes as "ideological constraints."
- On the wall opposite the surveillance portraits hang Lawson's signature intimate photographs of Black subjects in private settings — casually dressed or nude — creating a single continuum where "respectable" and surveilled Blackness sit side by side.
Why it matters: For Gagosian visitors, the exhibition operationalizes bell hooks' 'oppositional gaze,' making viewers implicate themselves in the act of looking at Black bodies. It demonstrates how disposable surveillance ephemera — normally ignored on beauty store walls — can become art that confronts viewers with biases the source calls 'ideological constraints' rather than private, inconsequential flaws.
Ask SkimNews
