I'm not

I'm not is the most private of Carmelo Stompo's bodies of work — built inside a single dim room crowded with tailor's mannequins: headless, armless torsos hung from the ceiling or propped against the walls like a congregation of doubles. A woman moves among them, sometimes still and lit like one more figure in the collection, sometimes caught mid-stride and blurred by a long exposure, dissolving into the dark the way a memory does. Hands recur throughout — gripping fabric, resting on a mannequin's shoulder, catching the light between two bodies, one real and one not — as if touch were the only proof of which is which. There is no statement for this project; it exists only as the pictures. But the title does the work a statement might otherwise do: a dummy is a stand-in, built to occupy the space a person would occupy, so the person doesn't have to.