Katy Grannan
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
5 January - 29 February, 2006
KATY GRANNAN’s striking, large-format, color portraits capture the desire of her subjects to offer themselves up to the camera lens. Katy Grannan’s previous series—“Poughkeepsie Journal,” “Dream America,” and “Morning Call”—began with a simple ad placed by Grannan in local newspapers: “Art Models. Artist/Photographer (female) seeks people for portraits. No experience necessary. Leave msg.” After an initial telephone conversation, Katy Grannan travels to the caller’s home where she captures each element of their domestic settings: wood paneling, patterned wallpaper, and other mundane but often telling details. In Katy Grannan’s recent Mystic Lake series, she moves the exercise outdoors, using a public lake and its banks as her backdrop. Even though the parkland that serves as her set brings the private encounters of her earlier series into the public landscape, she maintains a delicate – yet increasingly charged – sense of intimacy.
KATY GRANNAN was awarded the Aperture Award to an Emerging Artist in 2005 as well as The Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers in 2004. Model American: Katy Grannan, the artist’s first monograph, was recently published by Aperture. This is the first solo exhibition of Katy Grannan’s work at Fraenkel Gallery. The artist’s photographs are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
FRAENKEL GALLERY
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
