Downtown, Los Angeles
Gina Folly
Mona Lisa
O-Town HouseWith Mona Lisa, Gina Folly (b. Zurich, 1983; lives and works in Basel) turns her lens toward the improbable protagonists of the Giant Vegetables Championship in Malvern. These giant pumpkins are not simply oversized vegetables; they are cultivated anomalies—objects of obsession and pride. Like the painting invoked by the title, each pumpkin becomes a singular presence, the result of intense care and projection. Folly’s new series of photographs consider what it means to enlarge the ordinary far beyond reason. The “Mona Lisa” here, however, is not the pumpkin alone, but the relationship between object and gaze, where the spectator is also subject – mirroring our own act of looking.