Alice Wheeler – Women Are Beautiful

As a tribute to Garry Winogrand’s 1981 series, Women Are Beautiful, Alice Wheeler created her own collection of beautiful women. Her exhibit at Greg Kucera is the first foray for the series, which is ongoing.

Unlike Winogrand, Wheeler is not looking at the other. Plus, her definition
of the beautiful is far more generous than Winogrand’s. He focused on
the affluent, urban young. She includes the rural, the old, the flaky
and defiant, as well as those Winogrand would agree are lovely by
anyone’s measure.

The Winogrand-Wheeler connection is the sweep of a moment in motion, a fragment from life’s random stream that speaks volumes about the whole.

Women own their space in Wheeler’s work. Even when they are clearly being steered by a man through a scene not their own, their contact with Wheeler is electric.

Nan Goldin comes to mind, for good reason. Almost everybody working on the fierce end of the sexual vibe owes her, but if Goldin’s and Wheeler’s prints were in the same show, the differences would be apparent.

Wheeler is heads-up play. There’s an upbeat, irrepressible refusal to judge in her work, a determination not to call anybody a freak, unless as a compliment, and an inability to accept a depressing scene as a downer. She’s the kind of person who’d read The Metamorphosis and think it’s a comedy.

 In the photo above, PREGNANT WOMAN AT EVIL KNIEVEL DAYS, BUTTE, MT (2007), the man on the right looks as if he slipped out of a Matthias Grunewald to join the festivities. In Wheeler’s hands, he’s no longer an outsider. In her work, all the outs are in free.