For her solo exhibition Disappearances at Galerie Quang in Paris (2009), Isabelle Grosse photographed Anna Tokarska an international top model in the Church of Saint-Sulpice. Stripped of all artifice, without makeup, Tokarska is captured solely in the descending natural light filtering through the church's stained-glass windows. The professional practitioner of overexposure here undergoes a calculated disappearance, revealing an unexpected simplicity beneath the constructed image.

Several years later, Grosse turned her lens to drag queens, figures equally invested in strategies of hypervisibility. The images presented here capture the drag queen Calypso Overkill at the threshold of transformation the initial application of makeup marking the beginning of an elaborate process of self-construction that will culminate in the fully realized drag persona.

Two mirrored movements : the model descends from overexposure into erasure, the drag queen ascends from bare face into mask. Both negotiate the threshold between presence and absence, visibility and obscurity each gesture revealing how identity is constructed, performed, and ultimately dissolved in the space between exposure and erasure.