Catherine Reus

Mary was already hours deep when Catherine arrived.

The Alexandra Potter shoot had filled the morning and early afternoon. By the time Catherine Reus stepped onto set, Mary had been sealed inside the bear for the better part of the day. She had already been directed, positioned, walked, and photographed by someone she could not see. Now there was someone new in the 'room'. Mary had no way of knowing that.

Catherine came from a different world within the same ecosystem. Known through latexperiment, her presence brought a different energy to the set: warmer, more intimate, less performative. Where Alexandra had directed the bear with confidence and authority, Catherine approached it with curiosity. She sat beside it. Leaned into it. Looked at it the way you look at something when you are trying to understand what is happening inside.

The images from this session carry that quality. Catherine, in her black latex catsuit, gold cuffs catching the light, sitting on concrete steps with the bear slouched beside her. Standing next to it on the sidewalk, one hand resting on its arm, the other on her hip. Looking at it directly, closely, as if the softness of the fur might eventually reveal what it was hiding. The urban backdrop, brick, steel, and industrial glass, gave the frames a rawness that contrasted with the tenderness of her interaction.

What Catherine did not know, and what the camera could not show, was how far Mary had already traveled by that point. Hours of sensory deprivation do not accumulate linearly. The disorientation deepens, the sense of self thins, the boundary between the person and the costume blurs. By the time Catherine was posing beside the bear, Mary was no longer actively enduring the enclosure. She was somewhere else entirely, a place where the outside world had become abstract, and the interior of the bear had become the only reality she could access.

Catherine's session added new material to the archive: photography that reads as fashion-adjacent from the outside but carries the full weight of what was happening within. The contrast between her freedom of movement, her visibility, her expressions, and the figure inside the bear's total stillness creates a tension that the viewer feels before they can articulate it. Two women in the same frame. One chooses to be there. The other was unable to choose anything at all.

The day ended late. Mary had been inside for a duration that, by this point in the project's history, was the longest continuous session on record. When the bear was finally opened, the transition back was slow. Mary did not snap out of it. She surfaced gradually, as if returning from somewhere distant. The world outside the costume was loud, bright, and overwhelming in ways it had not been that morning.

Two collaborators in one day. Two entirely different dynamics with the same sealed figure. Alexandra commanded. Catherine connected. Mary experienced both without knowing which was which, without seeing either face, without hearing either voice. She felt only the difference in how she was touched, moved, and held.

That is what Xay One captures best: not the spectacle, but the invisible shifts that occur when the person inside cannot distinguish one reality from another.

Raymond K. Larum