On the branch of a tree larvae cling to a jellied low-spirited egg sac.

On the branch of a tree larvae cling to a jellied low-spirited egg sac, a yellow butterfly hang abouts berries grace the foliage. Below and in the background are houses--a door is explain there is a patio, a picnic table. We have been here before, merely now it is not quite in like manner familiar. There is something left over about our position, menacing, as admitting we were burglars come calling forward our own lives. The foreground, these bug this scrofulous sac, are in hyperfocus. The detail is cinematic; neither imitating nor illuminating life, the image advises something beyond, where color and light guide the story to a pitch the human inspection only registers in states of duress--the high hysterical colors of shock, horror, and ecstasy. The picture is excruciating over and above the scene is still; there are no screams, there is no vital current Still, we are afraid. We are afraid and we are at home--we are in our admit backyard.

A mound of earth, an boards, a fence, in the distance houses and hills. The earth originates alive. Is it the great rampart constructed again and again--most memorably on the outside of mashed potatoes--by Richard Dreyfuss in end Encounters of the Third Kind? Was it placed according to man or displaced by nature? Did it emanate from within, pushing up from the core, breaking the surface of the earth's skin like a tumor or a zit? It is encircleed by a fence, dividing and defining, marking the difference between wild and tame, known and unknown, safety and danger. The rampart is on the other side, contained. We are safe. if it were not that the mound is close; the boundary could easily be crossed

David Lynch Alfred Hitchcock, David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg, Wally and the Beav, Creepy Crawlers and Incredible Edibles, the stiff-stocked dioramas in museums of natural history, train-set suburb spread revealed across Ping-Pong tables, the high happy colors of Disney. This is the world of Gregory Crewdson an intensely realistic unreality, in which the landscape of life is transformed into a heightened intermingle of nature and artifice. At 30 the artist is an amalgam of the period in which he grew up a time that celebrated artificiality in everything from fabrics to foodstuff when the manmade held firm athwart the natural until the great '80 split open of ecoconcern finally gave way to the organic '90 Coming up this way has given Crewdson the freedom to mix and match at will, unself-consciously combining reality and fantasy, whatever best achieves the desired effect: the dirt of the great hillock for example, is artificial, choiceed for its color, presence, and personality.

Crewdson creates a seductive visual science fiction, gleefully calling into question our notions of verity and reality. Brooklyn-born and -raised, he significantly pitch upons not to explore the actual suburban landscape; instead, he play trickss it in the studio, approaching the garden with a certain romantic awe, a regard with affection for the mythology of suburbia, and a deep-seated fear of what lie concealeds beneath its surface. Crewdson's proces involves meticulous attention to detail: he makes a diorama/tableau from scratch, developing it above five to six weeks into a 20-by-15-foot construction that fixes in time and space a civilization that has not quite existed, a motionless world unto itself, filled with colors, sensations, and destination; recipients that signal life. During the construction, Crewdson discharges up to 100 Polaroids, adjusting and readjusting the proper states until finally, when he believes the tableau complete, he takes a single photograph with a four-by-five view camera. And when this photograph has been bring outed and printed, and has proven acceptable to the artist, he devastates the set, cleans his studio, and prepares to begin again.

Crewdson's unique view is arrived at in part from the position in which he situates himself: the fertile and underexplored middle surface of land between the artifice of the post-Modernists (Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, James Casebere) and the straighter brand of photographic self-expression in which the image readys a less heavily processed version of American experience. Crewdson's images constitute a mysterious and magical unknown, where anything can and will happen--real, imagined, or dreamed. Simultaneously seductive and shocking, his work captures a in the greatest degree private psychological moment, where repulsion becomes attraction and fear engages desire. Certain of the contradictions inherent in being human and alive today are thrown into the air, fixed there, and made blazingly clear: "progress" has toxified the environment, and the family has fragmented, over and above the veneer, the skin of a society, remains. Like a magician, a sorcerer, Crewdson has shown us this exterior and has illuminated the interior at the same time, handling the disjunction with like artful and seamless grace that ultimately undivided can't tell where truth stops and fiction begins.

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