Laural Nakadate @ PS1

Laurel Nakadate's work explores sadness, exploitation, and voyeurism. In her solo show at PS1, Only The Lonely, it is difficult to gauge where exactly the artist herself sits on the spectrum of those themes—that might be what makes the work so interesting.  In viewing the show, which is mostly video,  you become a voyeur yourself and are forced to decide, or at least deal with the concepts.

You watch the artist play dead on the side of the road and take off her clothes in the homes of older men she met at truck stops. You watch these ‘creepy’ men follow her through parking lots at night. Then you listen as Nakadate tells an adolescent girl half her age to strip. “Take off your shirt, don't you know how beautiful you are?” The girl in the video, who auditioned for the role, is shaking her head 'no'. Who is following who here?

Its easy to assume that the artist is a master of manipulation, tricking these characters, and maybe even tricking us into watching. In her most recent work, A Catalog of Tears, Nakadate photographed herself crying for 365 days in a row. She says she got the idea from pictures of people on Facebook. “You ever notice when you're on Facebook, all your friends are happy? Really? Is that true? All of my friends are happy?” Its a good point. Manipulation comes more naturally than we would like to admit.