Iris Klein is a multi-media artist born in Austria. She has lived and worked in Tokyo and New York and is currently based in Los Angeles. She has attended Santa Monica College in Los Angeles and Hunter College in New York. She received an Austrian State grant for Fine Art Photography in 2005 and has exhibited her work in multiple countries.

The photos in Bannister Gallery’s collection were acquired from her 2005 solo exhibition Iris Klein: Notes of a Body Double. The show was presented with the 2005 Annual October Series (a series of lectures and arts events hosted at RIC) themed around New Media Interpretations of Femininity. These images are from the series Kitchen, one of twenty sub-series of her photo project Women. In this series, beginning in 1998, Klein photographs an impossibly thin, life-sized rag doll in different domestic settings. Klein describes dolls as “Non-persons” capable of embodying cultural ideas—the doll acts as a symbol rather than an individual. In Women, the Non-person becomes a platform where Klein can experiment with atmospheric moods, light, gestures, poses, and motions.