Gregory Crewdson. House Taken Over

Crewdson constructs his indoor and outdoor scenes with visual languages from magicism and excessive realism. The dramatic and cinematic treatment of light and the unexpected discovery of certain objects or beings inside a house contribute to this confusion of planes (fiction or reality, dream state or awake). What is being questioned in each of his images is the boundary between the everyday and the paradox of strange spontaneity. Thus, what is domestic invades what is natural, while homes are invaded by unexpected elements (a forest in the middle of a lounge or towers of bread slices in a forest).

The house appears as a theme and setting par excellence in Crewdson’s images. In them, the house functions as a metaphor for existence and of a place where all our fears and threats converge. Tension is high in his photographs but under the apparent disposition (disorder) lurks a sinister silence. Nature is altered by the invading presence of man who in the end is thrown out of his home, overtaken by a nature who responds by overgrowing it. Each one of these images prompts a careful reading through the various physical and conceptual planes that appear intertwined in them: the place and moment when two worlds merge without a line of thought that can define them.