Katy Grannan, "The Happy Ever After"

As a photographer, Grannan has a peculiar penchant for mixing glamour and abjection, in portraits in the which the subjects (total strangers whom the artist meets on her travels around the country) seem perfectly ordinary on the surface, until they become somehow not through the alchemy of their relationship to Grannan and her camera. This is a two-part show: At Salon 94 Bowery, Grannan presents The Believers, her first video work. It features a group of women—street performers, celebrity impersonators—clinging to the very lowest rungs of the entertainment business. The spontaneous unscripted footage shows them telling their stories, though they're presented in no particular order so as to create a kind of nonlinear dreamscape—analogous, perhaps, to the illusionary world they create for themselves in order to keep going.