Ever painted self portraits? I did. Lots when I was a painter. Hour upon hour looking at me, failing likeness of me (for me, or how others perceived me). Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis pivots on ‘me-ness’, especially when looking in the mirror, that diptych of self, hinged or unhinged, me. Before self realisation in the mirror as infants we are happy, language free, unaware of the other, integrated in the world as a whole without desire to know oneself outside oneself because no split between here/here and over there/there exists, happy at the warm breast of the mother in a plump landscape until language wholly-holy-holey fucks it up. Our ‘likeness’ in the mirror is the difference between sepia Kansas and Technicolor Oz, home but not home, heimlich but unheimlich. Eva O’Leary’s photography brings all this home in the Technicolor of early adolescence sourced from her childhood home, Happy Valley, Pennsylvania. Yes, “Happy Valley”! Photographing adolescence—“female identifying” as the press release states in the gender-burdened vernacular of today—sets the stage for the expected: shuffling in seats, downward gazes, the battle with electric locks of hair that no scrunchie will ever tame. An accompanying film does all this like a lab experiment, cornering the subjects with focused denial; the way photographer Diane Arbus did when she skipped down to Washington Square Park N.Y. from her high-rise life to corner the subcultural basement of homeless winos and prostitutes described in the un-PC 1970s as “Freaks”. Sometimes when an artist corners a subject the artist gets cornered too. Subcultures reside in the corners of society, and artists are drawn to the little corners of society for their marvelous subjects. In some corner of some barn in Happy Valley—by the artist’s accounts a hyper-masculine jock and cock culture—O’Leary corners something so-so sweet—Wayne Thiebaud sweet—that the psychic excess that Judith Butler performs in terms of the performativity of gender and sexuality, and David Lynch aestheticizes in film from the abject soil of the American suburban pastoral, sours our gaze. These are photographs that aesthetically ripple outwards, strawberry and peach and ultramarine, dipping their toes in the cultural reservoir from which we now drink. Poison or not, these images are for drinking. Closely cropped photographic portraits give face, the face of early adolescence, that seedbed of adulthood and wet dream of sexuality we all pass through with retrospective astonishment at how we made it through in the first place. How? The confusion. The secrets. The pubic hair. The bubbling acne. The blood. Masturbation in theory. Braces. Pimples. B.O. Yes, that’s what we are smelling and looking at here, the biological gauge overheating, simmering to boil, to pop on the mirror. Not yet. Just yet. And yet, adolescence is nostalgia for those that made it through. The hope. The naiveté. The mistakes. The ripe innocence waiting to be spoilt. Not looking back, but forward, always forward. And what of innocence? To shelter from experience, good or bad, spoils in another way. Spoilt goes two ways: parents spoil and society spoils, the familial subjectivity of one vs. the cruel objectivity of the other. The spoilt will fly the nest to be spoilt. Inevitably. Waiting, waiting, waiting for the click of the camera, Eva O’Leary’s adolescent subjects have some control over their image as directors of the moment the photographer clicks the camera to capture their chosen pose reflected back at them in a two-way mirror. How do you pick yourself? It’s cruel. We don’t pick our name, our parents, our class. The other picks us—in the school yard. Here there’s no escape from me. You have to choose. Lips closed, parted, pearly whites, demented cheese. The body never fits never. Sugary seductive on the surface, the cavities of contemporary culture snarl through the American pie rictus of these in-limbo girls waiting to be photographed, waiting to be consumed, waiting for consummation. We look at these photographs of adolescent Americanness through the lens of contemporary adolescent culture which finds itself gazing at itself with an obsessiveness that would repel Narcissus. It’s the nowness of it all that gets you first; adolescent girls looking at themselves with thousand-yard stares in a two-way mirror (fit for the guilty until proven innocent). 10 years after Lacan’s mirror stage. 10 years off adulthood. 10 years off the future-mediated self that technology and society wills into being. Time transcends stillness as girl after girl after girl—in a Warholian sameness and multiplicity that draws out comparison and favourites—gets herself made up in front of the camera. “Identity is not personal” observed Deleuze. These are in-person photographs, in-the-flesh photographs, in-the-gallery photographs. Up close last night’s dreams flake in the corners of bejeweled eyes that in Millie’s case reflects her mirror image in one teensy, oily pupil. You might think that photography transcends medium-specificity; a photograph is the same in a book as it is on the cover of a magazine as it is on Instagram as it is, here, in the gallery, but you’d be wrong. Here the physically large format and display confronts. Here we are confronted by a double gaze, one that turns innards outwards. Larger than life, girl after girl blindly looks at herself, over the shoulder of shrunken-head you in the gallery. Their gazes are slightly off, as if contact lens have shifted and eyes are trying to focus on two things at once. Here, in the gallery, the hair and accessories that frame their faces have an aristocratic sparkle as they fade into pools of deep blue. We are a long way from the greys of German photographer Thomas Ruff’s new objectivity of the 1980s. Although here too an emotional blankness presents itself—a gunner-eye stare—as the world remotely holds itself in its hand. Ruff’s portraits are of his friends and peers who knew the score—they are making art, they are making a statement about themselves, their culture, what they see beyond the mirror. O’Leary’s subjects can’t look beyond the mirror. What they see in the mirror bounces back, hitting them hard in the midriff of identity, and a self in flux since the first day it toddled in front of the mirror and the world cracked in two.