annika von hausswolff  likes to play with her audience's head. Her works are complex and charged, addressing gender politics and violence, the personal and social, the psychological and the physical. The message of her work is specific to the viewer, evoking compassion and rage from women and often making men the guilty aggressor. Von Hausswolff's earlier works deal with violence against women and the relationship of women to nature. She photographed bodies, alleged victims, faceless beneath blankets or haphazardly strewn like a corpse within the picturesque Nordic landscape. The women, nude battered and bruised, have returned to nature in the most unnatural of ways. The work is also about the tenuousness of safety. In a healthy society or relationship boundaries are established to keep people safe, but when boundaries are broken or miscommunicated, the safety factor wanes, and we are left exposed.

Veering away from the victim-in-landscape motif, VonHausswolff's Self Portrait is a simple black and white photograph of the artist in a white undisclosed location. She stands alone in an awkward contrapposto, one arm disappearing behind her back while the other is raised to suck on her thumb. Her eyes gaze down and away and are slightly crossed, placing her expression somewhere between introspective contemplation and mental handicap. She straddles the psychological space between obviousness and enigma. Her fingers curve gently around her nose, obscuring her face, creating a boundary between her and the viewer. Being the only object in the frame, her form demands to be viewed, yet her expression, refusing eye contact, bars the viewer from any engagement. The work simultaneously seduces with curiosity and repels with awkwardness. The viewer remains a passive witness to obscurity.

We wonder if she, too, is a victim or if she is in fact an independent individual. Her stance, although unsettling, could be conceived as challenging. She makes her own rules and, in a childlike fashion, implements her own boundaries, testing limits and finding safety in the most trustworthy of places: her own being. Her thumbsucking is an undeniable comfort in a curiously frightful world.

--Larissa Raddell, MFA, Studio Art, George Washington University