LACMA presents dual exhibition of California-based photographers Katy Grannan and Charlie White. Exhibition highlights two bodies of work exploring concepts of identity through portraiture. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents The Sun and Other Stars: Katy Grannan and Charlie White, marking the first major museum exhibition to display the two photographers’ work in tandem. Grannan and White both employ portraiture to examine the fragility and resilience of individuality in a culture that has become increasingly enthralled by media representations of the ideal self. Through nearly seventy-five photos, as well as White’s video animation and a three-channel video installation by Grannan, this exhibition examines the complexity of the human condition and of modern subjectivity in particular.
The exhibition presents Katy Grannan’s Boulevard series, featuring an array of adult subjects plucked from the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Starkly contrasting her subjects against the solarized white stucco walls of California’s urban streets, Grannan draws these idiosyncratic individuals out from anonymity with uncompromising detail. In the camera’s rigidly frontal perspective, the subjects’ wistful gazes evoke Nathanael West’s doleful vision of the Hollywood dream, highlighting the alienation that exists between reality, desire, and aspiration. The show also presents Grannan’s first foray into film, a three-channel black and white video entitled The Believers. T
he work functions as a stage on which her female subjects – Melissa J. Weiss, Nicole Strada, and Linda Martinez – rehearse their fragmented stories of ambition and selffashioning. The boundaries between fact and fantasy are blurred when the documentary nature of The Believers’ mise-en-scène is choreographed into the artist’s imagined narratives. While Grannan uses portraiture to glean individuality from obscurity, Charlie White explores the homogeneity of celebrity culture through a series of deadpan photographs depicting teen girls against a gridded backdrop. Based on a professional casting call in which Caucasian, blonde adolescents aged 13-16 were invited to embody the quintessential “California Girl,” White’s photographs allude to the tyrannical appetite for celebrity and the popular iconography of the American teen manufactured by the media. In addition to 48 photos the exhibition features White’s personal collection of massculture ephemera and his new animation A Life in B Tween, which portrays the eagerness of contemporary youth culture to live life on camera.
Katy Grannan was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1969. She received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, and her MFA from Yale University in 1999. Her publications include Model American (Aperture, 2005), The Westerns (Fraenkel Gallery and Salon 94, 2008), and Boulevard (Fraenkel Gallery and Salon 94, 2011). She lives in Berkeley, California. Charlie White was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1972. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1995, and his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, in 1999. He is an associate professor in the Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California. His publications include And Jeopardize the Integrity of the Hull (TDM Editions, 2003), Monsters (PowerHouse Books, 2007), and American Minor (JRP|Ringier, 2009). He lives in Los Angeles. This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and made possible in part by LACMA’s Photographic Arts Council.
REPRESENTATION
KATY GRANNAN Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco – www.fraenkelgallery.com
Salon 94 New York, Salon 94 Bowery, Salon 94 Freemans – www.salon94.com
CHARLIE WHITE Brandstroem Gallery, Stockholm – www.brandstromstockholm.com
Loock Gallery, Berlin – loock.info
EXHIBITION
July 2-October 12, 2012
LACMA – Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA, 90036
USA
lacma.org
