FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

There is power in the photographs of Justine Reyes. Behind their veils, these women are hauntingly ancient and sexual. Pantyhose fetish takes on the proud, dark eroticism of Spanish Baroque. The eyes are piercing and provocative. Through gauzy nylons and lace, they peer with unblinking directness wantonly out at any taker. —She is your willing victim, perhaps, who owns you; or the one who will kill you, slowly, to your infinite pleasure.

“By photographing herself wearing these masks,” as Velle Magazine writes, “Reyes is able to make public a private performance, both an erotic and obscene gesture. She works with pantyhose because they are a highly fetishized material but to also make reference to the pantyhose masks of criminals.” Here, we might also add, 'victims,' as indeed many of Reyes’ ‘headmistresses’ are reminiscent of medieval torture devices and nineteenth century brams reserved for muzzling women who ‘wouldn’t shut up.’ One also thinks of the kidnapper’s mewling prisoner, silenced as she is raped, struggling to breathe.

“The mystery that the veil or mask creates,” says the artist, “is one that is highly sexualized. There is a tension created by veiling. Some people are afraid of not knowing what lies beneath the veil. In this work, I use the mask to explore issues of identity, veiling and the gaze in relationship to power and sexuality.”

The veil has become the (anti-)banner of women’s rights. The raging Islamic prohibition on women exposing their faces translates in the West as oppression. Indeed, many elements within the Islamic world are against sensuality and are egregiously oppressive to women. But that is not the whole story. The veil is not inherently anti-sexual. As Reyes notes, to many Muslims, the historical reclaiming of the veil in the post-Colonial Muslim world was instead mainly a response to years of colonial oppression, when the wearing of the veil was outlawed. The ban, of course, does not extend to blinding women by covering their eyes. Ironically, as Reyes makes clear, the eyes are the most erotically dangerous part; even sometimes, as in some of her photographs, when they are covered. Nor is this lost on the Islamic imagination.

Western viewers may be more familiar with European veil eroticism, as for example in late 18th and early 19th century paintings of proud Spanish doñas, coquettishly hiding behind their lace mantillas and fans. Reyes is quick to point out that some of this was the West exoticizing Orientalism. One needn’t look too hard to see inflections of all these dimensions in Reyes’ hand-sewn pantyhose veils—nor to recognize them as fetishized gas masks and hazmat gear of the post-9/11 world of fear and aggression.

Reyes further develops the theme of the veil as a response to terror in Untitled (3/2004 to the Present), her thirteen enormous crocheted panels that hang the length of the main gallery. She has worked on this mourning veil every day since the war began. It is her humble meditation on all the death that she (and we) can neither see, nor even comprehend. Three years of tiny stitches have turned it into a monument.    

-text by Don Carroll

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