Mabel, Betty & Bette [Signed]

Book signed and numbered on sticker

Softcover with dust jacket
148 pages
3 double gate-folds
23 x 29 cm

Designed by Alex Wiederin, Buero New York

Color & Post TwoThreeTwo

Text by Yelena Yemchuk and Sara VanDerBeek

Edition of 500 copies

Printed by Robstolk Amsterdam

Kominek Books, 2021

Who Is This, Who Am I, Who Are You?

Mabel, Betty & Bette is an exploration of the often elusive nature of identity. In this series of images and in the film of the same title, the female figure acts as a threshold between two worlds.

Mabel, Betty & Bette explores female archetypes as both actual bodies and mythic spaces upon which projections of self and society fall. In particular, Yemchuk focuses on moments of change, crisis, or loss of self, embodied by an expanding cast of over 50 women photographed in carefully chosen places that evoke both the familiar and the bizarre.

Yemchuk constructs and captures the amnesiac moment when the dreamer wakes: an intersection between parallel universes, and the alarm and confusion that accompany the void between dreaming and waking.

She has created three fictional women — Mabel, Betty, and Bette. Each photograph portrays one of the three women as conveyed by a cast member wearing one of three corresponding wigs. These images are punctuated by collages exploring female archetypes of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Three different storylines written by the artist are personified by three sets of wigs worn by the different cast members. At the center of this project is a moving image work filmed in Yemchuk’s native Ukraine, with Ukrainian artist Anna Domashyna performing as all three characters.