Animus

Lynn Stern’s haunting new book Animus – her third monograph – is a full-scale immersion in the dark night of the soul. Continuing her ten-year involvement with skull imagery, she portrays the restlessly changing shape of an ambiguous animal/human skull and transforms it into a luminous force – sometimes vicious, sometimes benign, but always alluring and dramatic. A consummate craftsman, Stern uses a split-toning process to intensify the eerie incandescence of her pictures and heighten the feeling of spacial disorientation. In his essay, renowned art critic Donald Kuspit writes: “I think her ambition . . . is nothing less than to picture the unconscious. . . .” Abstraction, he suggests, seems to model itself on the dynamics of the unconscious, and “Stern’s Animus photographs show how insidious and dramatic and urgent such abstraction can be.” Beautifully printed in quadratone, Animus is a singular and profound work, and an important contribution to the dialogue of contemporary art.