Stills

Stills presents, for the first time in full, Sarah Charlesworth's 1980 series of fourteen photographs depicting figures falling or jumping from buildings, each print exceeding six feet in height.

Charlesworth appropriated the source images from newspapers and re-photographed them, stripping away captions and context to isolate the suspended instant of the fall. Seven works debuted in 1980 at Tony Shafrazi's gallery; the remaining seven existed only as negatives until Charlesworth printed them as artist's proofs for the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. This 2014 publication, with an essay by curator Matthew S. Witkovsky, was issued alongside the museum's exhibition of the complete set.

A key figure of the Pictures Generation, Charlesworth used appropriation to interrogate how mass-media images construct meaning, a concern she shared with contemporaries such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. Stills resurfaced in 2011 in the group exhibition September 11 at MoMA PS1, where its unattributed, ambiguous falling bodies took on new and unavoidable resonance.