Sharon Haskell

Inspired by the work of the early 20th century avant-garde, especially Surrealist photographers, Sharon Haskell creates tenebrous, otherworldly images that transform the familiar into the fantastical. In her work, recognizable subjects, such as the iconic Brooklyn Bridge or a Mallorca sunset, are rendered as moody and uncanny. In her series Thru the keyhole, whose title recalls the hallucinatory encounters of Alice in Wonderland, Haskell creates hazy and mysterious collages of organic material such as spirals and flowers against interior scenes, suggesting an inner world. Likewise, in the series Rebus, she creates visual analogues to the eponymous language game, which was similarly influential on the Surrealists for its psychoanalytic implications: Sigmund Freud used the rebus as a metaphor for the structure of a dream.