“It’s a dream sequence,” said Nancy Newberry of her evocative, Texas-centric photographic series, “Halfway to Midland,” which is on view through June 27 at the Centro de Arte in Alcobendas, Spain as part of this year’s PhotoEspaña festival. (A survey of Philip-Lorca DiCorcia’s work is up through July 5.) Newberry had previously explored her home state’s idiosyncrasies with a series, “Mum,” dedicated to a Lone Star homecoming tradition. (As Jezebel explains, it involves a variety of corsages, “many bigger than a dinner plate and covered in artificial flowers, ribbons, and even stuffed animals”). While that earlier series involved shooting teenagers’ portraits in their own homes — resulting in a mix of documentary and fiction, Newberry said — “Halfway to Midland” is set in a “fabricated combination of places,” with many of the scenes captured in either Dallas or Marfa, and with models who “play out characters” for the photographer. The resulting images have the eerily awkward ambience of “Dogtooth,” transposed on a very different cultural milieu.
The installation in Alcobendas breaks the photographs into punctuated phrases: Young girls engaged in cheerleading-style pyramid-building; a series of what appear to be training exercises; horses in myriad artificial forms (tiny figurine, full-size statue, kitschy mirror). “There’s a mythology about how you grow up, and these cliches of the West, from movies and magazines,” Newberry said, clearly reflecting and responding to some of those predetermined stereotypes in her work. Yet the photographer is also culling personal experience — she cited a fascination with uniforms, the result of an upbringing in a Roman Catholic family with plenty of military members, in a state fixated on athletics and pageantry. “This is all based on concepts that, growing up, were important to participate in — cheerleading, band, these types of activities, and how people find their own identity through these social affiliations,” she said. Like “Mum,” “Halfway to Midland” is a hybrid of the actual and the invented. “It’s a fantasy,” Newberry said, “based on memories and realities of location.”
