Lalla Essaydi. Bullets #5, 2009; chromogenic print; 48 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco.

Lalla Essaydi’s highly staged tableaux employ the domestic spaces of her native Morocco to challenge the Orientalist imaging of Arab women. New Beauty at Jenkins Johnson Gallery brings together sixteen photographs from the artist’s two most recent series, Harem Revisited and Bullets Revisited, which expand her investigation of the harem as an architectural and social structure of confinement for women in Islamic culture.

Essaydi’s large-format chromogenic prints, all shot in the isolated space of the harem in palaces and homes around Marrakech, are visually alluring. The pictured women glint with gold clothing and jewelry made from bullet casings, or are swathed in intricately adorned fabrics in saturated hues. For the models’ poses and groupings, the artist references an art-historical lineage that includes 19th-century painters Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Eugène Delacroix, twisting familiar imagery into disconcerting scenes.

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