Alex Prager @ Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong

Alex Prager
Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong
January 18 – March 17, 2018

ALEX PRAGER

Hawkins Street, 2017 

Archival pigment print, 12.97 x 24 inches (print), 32.9 x 61 cm. 

Courtesy of Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong 

Lehmann Maupin presents an  exhibition of new work by ALEX PRAGER. The Los Angeles-based artist returns to Hong Kong with her signature style of theatrical and meticulously staged photography and film, as well as her first exhibited sculpture. In her most recent series, Prager manipulates scale and dimension to challenge our understanding of the boundary between fiction and reality. 

Those familiar with Alex Prager’s work will recognize elements that recall past series, such as Face in the Crowd (2013), in which her compositions highlighted the contrast between crowded public spaces and a lone heroine. These latest works push the theatrical narrative potential of her prior series. The imagery lays bare the artifice in its creation, achieved through impossible, contrived viewpoints, layering of incongruent scenes—such as a rainy day on top of a sunny one—and other formal and technical controls that challenge the assumed naturalism of photography and film.

One such formal device is scale—a major component in the production and installation of the work—with Alex Prager varying the dimensions of the photographs according to the level of distortion she intends to achieve. In Hand Model (2017), a woman’s outstretched hand is blown up larger than life, referencing the often unrealistic scaling and cropping of images in the advertising and fashion industries, a concept reinforced by the title. The same image of the hand also appears in miniature scale as a prop advertisement in Star Shoes (2017), and unexpectedly, as a sculpture prodtrouding from the gallery wall in Hand Model (detail) (2017). In this multifold presentation of the same image, the meaning is conveyed in two radically different ways—as the emphasized subject and a trivial detail. Throughout the exhibition, Prager expertly guides the viewer to a predetermined end, using the play with proportion and form to question the assumption that a photograph faithfully represents reality.

With this new body of work, Alex Prager realizes an ambitious formal approach to achieve the dynamic tension she previously created through more traditional storytelling devices. Alex Prager removes the certainty of the omnipotent perspective of the viewer through scale, dramatic cropping, layering, and uncontextualized settings, replacing it with a disorienting awareness of the constructed nature of most “real world” imagery we encounter. Contemporary society is awash in visual information—we are presented with versions of reality in marketing, news, and social media, but we rarely pause to consider how our thoughts are guided in the process of looking. Alex Prager’s work calls this into question, and not only reveals the scene she intends to present, but makes the viewer aware of the psychological processes involved in their own observations.

ALEX PRAGER

Alex Prager (b. 1979, Los Angeles, lives and works in Los Angeles) has had solo exhibitions of her work organized at Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland (forthcoming, 2018); Des Moines Art Center, IA (2017-2018); Saint Louis Art Museum, MO (2015); Galerie des Galeries, Paris (2015); Goss Michael Foundation, Dallas (2015); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2014); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2013); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2013); and Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam (2012). Select group exhibitions featuring her work include Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2016-2015); Open Rhapsody, Beirut Exhibition Center, Lebanon (2015); The Noir Effect, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (2014); No Fashion, Please: Photography Between Gender and Lifestyle, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2011); and New Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). Her work is in numerous international public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Australia; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

Alex Prager has received numerous awards, including the FOAM Paul Huf Award (2012), The Vevey International Photography Award (2009), and the London Photographic Award (2006). Her editorial work has been featured in prominent publications, including Vogue, New York Magazine, and W, and her film series Touch of Evil, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine, won a 2012 Emmy award. During the summer of 2017, her first major public commission, Applause, debuted for Times Square Arts: Midnight Moment, New York. In June 2018, a major monograph of her work, Silverlake Drive, will be published by Thames & Hudson.

LEHMANN MAUPIN HONG KONG
407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Hong Kong
www.lehmannmaupin.com

Alex Prager @ Lehmann Maupin, New York

Alex Prager
La Grande Sortie
Lehmann Maupin, New York
September 7 - October 23, 2016

ALEX PRAGER

La Grande Sortie, 2015

6 archival pigment prints, single-channel video with color and sound on blue-ray disc and thumb drive, storyboards, 17 x 22 in, 43.2 x 55.9 cm (print), duration: 10 minutes.

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Lehmann Maupin presents La Grande Sortie, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Alex Prager. The exhibition will feature Prager’s newest film, La Grande Sortie, in its US premiere, along with a new series of photographs shot on location during the film’s production in Paris. In this body of work, the viewer is confronted with the dual perspectives of performer and audience and asked to consider the underlying tension inherent in this relationship. The opening reception on Wednesday, September 7, will feature live ballet solos at 6:30PM and 7:30PM. These performances, featuring original choreography to Bohuslav Martinů’s “Film en Miniature,” set amid the attendees and Prager’s artwork, further underscore the artist’s curatorial approach, which conflates the traditional roles of viewer and performer.

Alex Prager has garnered acclaim for her intricately staged, highly complex imagery that makes use of cinematic convention as a tool to challenge narrative tropes and offer deeper psychological associations to seemingly ordinary themes. With the release of her film Face in the Crowd (2014), an examination of crowd dynamics and the individual, Prager solidified her standing as an auteur whose ominous, experimental works conjure feelings of anxiety, apprehension, and dread, while simultaneously offering the viewing pleasure and intrigue of a Hollywood movie. Her images often allude to their own artifice by exaggerating the on-screen manipulations of the film industry, such as makeup or lighting effects, in an attempt to reveal the often-hidden reality of the human condition on film.

In her film La Grande Sortie (2015; 10 minutes), commissioned by the Paris Opera Ballet and debuted in September 2015 on its digital platform 3ème Scène, Prager tells the story of a prima ballerina, played by French Étoile (star) dancer Émilie Cozette. The film’s score, sampled from Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” was composed by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, with choreography created in collaboration with the Paris Opera Ballet, adapted from Creative Director Benjamin Millipied’s iconic piece, Amoveo. Shot in the renowned Ópera Bastille, the setting is opening night of Cozette’s return to the stage after an unexplained hiatus. The performance is fraught with the dancer’s stage fright and the indifferent and hostile reactions that escalate in the audience. Cozette’s fears manifest in a series of awkward dances, each accompanied by a boorish audience member—played by a mix of retired Paris Opera Ballet dancers and dance teachers—who are magically transported from their seat to the stage. Culminating in a fantastical vanishing act, La Grande Sortie embodies a universal anxiety around performance and success that many people struggle with on a daily basis.

The new photography series installed in the gallery’s main exhibition space delves further into the dynamics between artist and viewer through the opposing lens of performer and audience. Given the vantage point of the performer looking out onto the audience, the viewer is forced to be the focus of self-conscious awareness, and must interpret the variety of expressions of the theatergoers that range from boredom and judgment to concentration and enjoyment. An audio recording of ambient theater crowd noise played on a loop further heightens this illusion. As a final unsettling device, mannequins are interspersed among the audience members, creating a surreal and somewhat terrifying juxtaposition between actor and prop.

As Alex Prager oscillates between these shifting points of view and duality of artifice and reality, she breaks the “fourth wall,” an invisible barrier between the stage and audience, creating a liminal space that invites consideration of how we absorb notions of truth and fiction within visual culture.

About the artist: Short biobraphy

ALEX PAGER (b. 1979, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) has had solo exhibitions of her work organized at the Saint Louis Art Museum, MO (2015); Galerie des Galeries, Paris (2015); Goss Michael Foundation, Dallas (2015); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2014); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2013); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2013); and the FOAM Photography Museum, Amsterdam (2012). Select group exhibitions featuring her work include Open Rhapsody, Beirut Exhibition Center (2015); The Noir Effect, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (2014); No Fashion, Please: Photography between Gender and Lifestyle, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2011); and New Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). Her work is in numerous international public and private collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Prager has received numerous awards, most notably the FOAM Paul Huf Award (2012). Her editorial work has been featured in prominent publications including Garage, Vogue, and W, and her film series Touch of Evil, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine, won a 2012 Emmy Award.

LEHMANN MAUPIN
201 Chrystie Street, New York City
www.lehmannmaupin.com

MoMA New Photography 2010: Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager, Amanda Ross-Ho

New Photography 2010
Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager, Amanda Ross-Ho
MoMA, New York
Through January 10, 2011 

 

ALEX PRAGER (American, born 1979)
Crowd #1 (Stan Douglas). 2010
W, November 2010
Chromogenic color print - 48 x 80 1/2" (121,9 x 204,5 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
© 2010 Alex Prager

For New Photography 2010, The Museum of Modern Art highlights four artists in its annual showcase of significant recent work in contemporary photography, with the 2010 edition marking the 25th anniversary of the series. The exhibition features the work of Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager, and Amanda Ross-Ho, all of whom engage photography as a medium with fluid borders between editorial work, film, and art. Their pictures—shot in the real world, posed in the studio, or culled from pop culture and the movie industry—constantly shift contexts, often circulating from the magazine page to the wall. New Photography 2010 is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Since its inception in 1985, the New Photography series has introduced the work of over 70 artists from 16 countries. The Museum continues this tradition of highlighting significant accomplishments in contemporary photography with this year’s edition featuring four artists and 36 works of photography and film. 

“These artists engage in a kind of post-appropriative practice,” explains Roxana Marcoci. “If in the 1970s Richard Prince questioned notions of originality by rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own, this younger group of artists reinvest in photographic authorship, creating pictures that often exist simultaneously as commercial assignment and artwork. They recognize photography to be a fluid medium.”

 

 

ROE ETHRIDGE (American, born 1969)
Comme des Garçons Scarf with Glass Plate. 2010
Chromogenic color print - 72 x 60" (182,9 x 152,4 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
© 2010 Roe Ethridge

 ROE ETHRIDGE (American, b. 1969), who studied photography at The College of Art in Atlanta, takes his shoots in “editorial mode,” directly borrowing images already in circulation, including outtakes from his own commercial work. Drawing upon the traditions of descriptive photography and photography as a resource of mass imagery to be duplicated and recombined, the artist orchestrates visual fugues: a plain white plate grabbed from Bed Bath & Beyond’s website is superimposed on a checkered Comme des Garçons scarf; a model dressed in an Alexander McQueen shirt poses against a tripod at Pier 59; two filmic pictures of a Juilliard ballet student were initially published in Vice magazine; a model from the Chanel Spring ’09 fashion show is culled from The New York Times; a pumpkin sticker is shot in close-up view and magnified; a red bag is featured in a corner of the artist’s studio; and a still life displays moldy fruit. Abandoning conventional photographic aesthetics in favor of intentionally inconsistent modes of representation, Ethridge’s pictures acquire their distinct meaning from the salient way they are reshuffled, sequenced, and laid out.

 

 

ELAD LASSRY (Israeli, born 1977), Woman (Camera), 2010. Chromogenic color print, 8 1/2 x 10 1/2" (21,6 x 26,7 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century © 2010 Elad Lassry, courtesy David Kordansky Gallery.

 ELAD LASSRY (Israeli, b. 1977) defines his practice as one consumed with pictures, meaning with generic images culled from vintage picture magazines or film archives. After attending CalArts as a film student, the artist earned an MFA from the University of Southern California. Tapping into the visual culture of still and motion pictures, Lassry’s practice is as much engaged with the history of building stories with images as with the ghosts of history that persist long after images have been lifted out of their original context. Lassry demands viewers to rethink what it means to arrive at a point visually. His vibrantly colored pictures—studio portraits of friends and celebrities, still life compositions, and photocollages—never exceed the format of a magazine spread and are displayed in matching frames that derive their color from the dominant hues in the photographs. In their deadpan objecthood and Pop subject matter, Lassry’s images mimic the condition of non-art; yet his most direct shots are upended by an occasional blur, double-exposure, or the sandwiching of multiple negatives. Lassry often places his photographs beside 16-mm film projections. Untitled (2009), featuring Eric Stoltz in the role of choreographer teaching steps to a dancer dressed in red bodysuit, heightens the tension between stillness within the moving image and the temporality of the static image. A deft explorer of the relationship between image and picture, Lassry perks up the seductive language of film and advertising with a touch of subversive conceptualism.

 

 ALEX PRAGER (American, born 1979), Susie and Friends from the series The Big Valley. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 48 x 73 1/2" (121,9 x 186,7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art © 2010 Alex Prager, courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery

A self-taught photographer, ALEX PRAGER (American, b. 1979) takes her cues from pulp fiction, the cinematic conventions of movie directors such as Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock, and the stylized fashion works of Guy Bourdin to construct images that are intentionally loaded, not unlike silent movies. Her unnerving narratives feature women disguised in synthetic wigs, dramatic makeup, and retro polyester attires. Shot from unexpected angles and dramatically lit, her crisp, boldly colored photographs offer a feeling of disquiet. Crowd #1 (Stan Douglas), one in a series of pictures shot for the November 2010 issue of W magazine, makes its debut here. It draws from Stan Douglas’s Hastings Park, 16 July 1955 (2008), among other sources, but Prager has enlisted a new cast of characters, dressed in 1970s outfits (which she selected), and shot the scene in her own signature style. The exhibition also presents the U.S. premiere of Prager’s debut film, Despair (2010). This four-minute film starring the actress Bryce Dallas Howard is, according to the artist, a “full-sensory version” of her photographs. Set in 1960s Los Angeles to a score by composer Ali Helnwein, this short is inspired by the 1948 film The Red Shoes, about a prima ballerina whose obsession with dance conflicts with her need for love, ultimately leading to her suicide. Focusing on the actress’s face to capture one intense emotion, Prager’s construction of images is intentionally loaded, reflecting her fascination with, and understanding of, cinematic melodrama. 

 

AMANDA ROSS-HO (American, born 1975), Irreconcilable Indifferences, 2010
Chromogenic color print - 44 x 34 3/16" (111.8 x 86.8 cm)
Courtesy the artist, Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York   © 2010 Amanda Ross-Ho

AMANDA ROSS-HO (American, b. 1975) received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Southern California. Nodding to various stages of the creative process, her distinctive installations typically include a mix of collages, assemblages, mural-scale inkjet prints of studio residues, and hand-drilled Sheetrock panels propped against the wall that function like architectural backdrops. The Sheetrock panel in this exhibition is lined up with found images scanned from the pages of craft manuals and photography textbooks, but also includes pictures that have familial significance, such as a gelatin silver print portrait taken by the artist’s mother in the 1970s, and a reprint from a large color transparency of a composition with glasses, originally taken by her father in the context of his work as a commercial photographer. Ross-Ho grew up in a family of photographers, both commercial and artistic. As a child she spent time with her mother while she worked in the darkroom, and often stood as a model for test shots taken by her uncle and father. Within this framework of relationships, Ross-Ho renegotiates the definition of craft processe and commercial photography in contemporary practice.

The exhibition is made possible by the Carl Jacobs Foundation.

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, NY
The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery, third floor
September 29, 2010 - January 10, 2011 

Website: www.moma.org