Who’s Afraid? captures the tension between men’s anxiety of being unreasonably accused of inappropriate behavior and women’s fear of sexual harassment and assault. It is referencing the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the inherent tension between actors and audience that is part of a theater performance and in this play the volatile and complicated relationship between men and women. Furthermore, it also relates to Michele Landel’s previous series For There She Was that explored women refusing to disappear and Virginia Woolf’s literature.
Who's Afraid? addresses men's fear of women. To explore this, Landel began with the gaze, specifically the "male gaze" as defined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey. She started with a photograph of an anonymous woman from a clothing catalogue, one that sits interestingly within Mulvey's three phases of the male gaze: how men look at women, how women look at themselves, and how women look at other women. Landel enlarged the photograph, divided it into small rectangles, and printed it onto reclaimed bed linens. She then pieced the image back together and, using machine embroidery, covered the woman's skin, hair, and clothes entirely in thread. She cut out the woman's eyes to unsettle the viewer. In doing so, she evokes the ghost costume, eyes cut from an old bed sheet, while playing with the relationship between spectator and specter, both derived from the Latin spect, meaning "to see." From a distance, the embroidered figure appears three-dimensional, seeming to return the viewer's gaze, though her eyes are empty. She is nothing more than an embroidered bed sheet, and yet her vacant stare provokes anxiety and feels strangely powerful.
The meaning shifts depending on where the sheet is draped. In some photographs it is hung over a fauteuil emmanuelle, directly connecting the work to Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and to avant-garde erotic cinema. Elsewhere, the sheet is thrown over a large, indeterminate piece of furniture, as though a house has been left empty, a reference to Freud's concept of the uncanny. Cascading down a staircase, the sheet becomes a cinematic specter, at once fictional and unsettling.
This artwork was incinerated by a shipping company during the 2020 COVID pandemic. The artist remade it in 2021.