Rewilding

Description

A joyous portrait of modern femininity and a frolicking celebration of women's camaraderie Over the past ten years, Cass Bird (born 1974) has established herself as one of the foremost portraitists of contemporary America. Her photographs of young women and men casually draw attention to the fluid expression of gender roles and androgyny in today's youth culture, and to what she has described as "the convergence of alternative lifestyles with accepted conceptions of motherhood, nurturing and family." In the summers of 2009 and 2010, Bird traveled to Sassafrass, Tennessee, with a group of young women, a wardrobe of diaphanous dresses and a camera. These women--studio assistants, friends, or women cast from the streets of New York--had been selected by Bird for their ease with their sexual identities, but also for their relative awkwardness in front of the lens. The result was Rewilding, a joyous portrait of modern femininity and a frolicking celebration of women's camaraderie.

In "Rewilding," Bird recasts the artist haven of Sassafrass, Tenn., as a naturalistic oasis where women are unafraid not only to roughhouse, climb trees and dress in breast-baring overalls but also feel free to reclaim tokens of femininity (tutu-like skirts, pigtails and rollers among them) for their own purposes.--Sarah Scire "T: The New York Times Style Magazine" Rewilding, which Bird shot over two weeks in 2009 and 2010 in a lush artists' community in Tennessee called Sassafras, consists of works of a different stripe. The book's focus is modern feminity in an idyllic, naturalistic setting, and there is a brute physicality at play within the grace of her images. In the book's foreward, Sally Singer, who has favoured Bird's work in her tenure at T magazine, writes, I don't think there is anyone working right now in photography who has the same ease with her subjects, the same youthfull seductive energy, the same mix of spontaneity and aesthetic rigor.--Alessandra Codinha "WWD"