A young girl in an antiquated frock runs away from the frame: a figure in white against a grayscale background, she runs towards darkness opening. A figure: almost a woman, body curved invitingly on a bed stares into the lens, eyes of a warrior, she both beckons and refuses—ghostly cyan red flare hovers by her side, otherworldly.
In the Company of Wolves is Siri Kaur’s three decades long sustained engagement with the strange, uncanny thresholds between being a child and an adult, between violence and pleasure, looking and being seen, power and submission.
These photographs weave Kaur’s prolonged and penetrating observation of the characters within her own family with figures from archetypal myths that were meant to sing the songs of adolescence and age: change that transforms us all.
A girl’s face becomes a woman’s—or does it?—camera hovers close to the mysteries of her passage. A man’s face lives like a husk or a shell on a table top, removed from the head where it belongs. Close up color flesh wounds: a galaxy writ in blood. Gorgeous crone in blue pastel princess sleeves wraps clasped, gnarled hands around her belly, origin place of them all.
Reflection of unseen fire dances on shimmering waves, or a body drowns beneath what might also be an old master’s painting of a sea battle painted in oils, impossible to tell. In the Company of Wolves plays with familial figures alongside tropes like Little Red Riding Hood, girls in hooded cloaks gifted to them by their grandmothers, the color of blood and fire. Weaving the haunting, cautionary tales of shapeshifters and family expectations gone awry, Kaur drinks deep from the wellspring of fairy tales that emerged centuries ago from the forests of central Europe to be passed down and traded through contemporary retellings like Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.
Whose company are we in, who and where are the wolves? If wolves are wild animals that once roamed dark forests but also men who roam city streets, might they not also be the figures that have been sold to us as innocents even when their gazes blaze otherwise, might they not also live inside us? In an age of receding glaciers, fire ravaged forests, invisible digital connectivity even in the furthest reaches, tales of undomesticated nature loom ever larger in the collective imagination.
Kaur’s work looks quizzically at what it is to be a girl in this world, a young person, to feel eyes watching as you grow and become, to wrestle with the thrill of power that accompanies objectification.
Shifting ever more into the Information Age/The Anthropocene, everywhere answers are promised, searches available faster and faster at the finger’s tips, the tacit message: all will be revealed, solved, laid bare—the faster the better. In the Company of Wolves resists this flow, interrupts the current, moves through the cultural breaking point to usher us towards paradigmatic shift. The images in Kaur’s work refuse ground, refuse revelation. Instead, they problematize the terror and magic of mysteries—not as enigmas to be solved but as cyphers to be honored. Viewers are invited to dwell in the discomfort of not knowing, the rapture of shifting positions: the slippery slick between desire and objectification, possession and loss.
If photography is the medium that has promised the capture of the real, Kaur’s work subverts this promise and offers instead the complex and shifting dynamics of myths and archetypes—the foreboding, uncanny, ominous sensibilities of enchantment. Her work invites us to step into eco feminist fairy tales, to feel the hairs on the back of our necks stand up as we turn to face the dangers that both threaten and seduce, the ones that lurk at the edge of the woods.