Deana Lawson’s Edge Control puts beauty-store surveillance images on view in New York

Deana Lawson’s Edge Control is on view at Gagosian in New York through October 24, 2026, bringing images drawn from beauty-supply-store surveillance into a gallery installation of photographs, mirrors and holograms. A Guardian review published October 10 describes how the enlarged images place visitors in the position of looking at people originally pictured in store warnings about alleged theft.

The exhibition opened September 10 at Gagosian’s 541 West 24th Street gallery. Gagosian describes it as Lawson’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and says it addresses personhood, surveillance and control. Those are the gallery’s stated themes; the Guardian’s Morgan Jerkins offers a separate critic’s account of how the works operate in the room.

How Edge Control changes the scale of surveillance images

Gagosian says Lawson’s Edge Control series began in 2023 and reimagines surveillance stills used by beauty-supply stores across the United States. According to the gallery, the original images appeared on store windows and entryways. The exhibition takes pictures associated with warnings about alleged shoplifting and presents them as artworks in a setting where visitors can spend time looking at them.

Jerkins reports that Lawson enlarges images of people identified in the store context as alleged shoplifters and frames the works with mirrors. In the reviewer’s description, visitors see themselves while looking at the pictured people. The change in size and setting makes the act of looking a visible part of the installation, rather than leaving the images as small notices among store products.

The exhibition’s title refers to products used to smooth hair along the hairline. Gagosian also connects the phrase to systems of control and image-based policing. Lawson told the gallery that the blue-green appearance of surveillance footage led her to think about the supply chain ending in beauty stores she frequents. That account connects the source images to the products and spaces in which they were displayed.

What visitors see beyond the store images

The surveillance-derived works are one part of the installation. Jerkins describes two holograms showing Black women’s bodies that appear differently as a visitor changes position. The reviewer also reports that portraits of Black people in private settings hang opposite the surveillance images. The arrangement puts images made under different circumstances into the same field of view.

Jerkins reads that arrangement as a challenge to the viewer’s judgments about who is watched and how Black subjects are perceived. Her review draws on bell hooks’s essay The Oppositional Gaze to discuss spectatorship and the possibility of looking back. This is the critic’s interpretation of the exhibition, rather than a measured account of how visitors generally respond.

Gagosian gives a narrower account of the artist’s intent: it says the works neither condemn nor praise the alleged petty theft associated with the source pictures. Instead, the gallery says they foreground agency and the transformative potential of beauty products. That description should be read as the exhibiting institution’s explanation of the work, not as an independent finding about the people photographed.

When and where to see Deana Lawson’s exhibition

Gagosian lists the exhibition at 541 West 24th Street, New York, through October 24, with public hours Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The gallery also lists an October 15 conversation with Lawson, photographers Paul Graham and Collier Schorr, moderated by Joshua Chuang, at 6:30 p.m. at the gallery. Visitors planning a trip can use the gallery’s exhibition listing for those details.

The show presents an encounter with surveillance images, but the available accounts do not establish an effect on beauty-store surveillance practices or on the people depicted. What is documented is the exhibition’s arrangement: images taken from store-warning contexts appear at a new scale, alongside mirrors, holograms and portraits, until the scheduled closing date.