Lucy Levene "L.A. Stories"
511 Gallery
This event has ended.
511 GALLERY presents L.A. Stories, an exhibition of photographs by young British artist Lucy Levene. In this most recent exhibition, the artist shows large c-prints captured during 2009, when she was living in California.
The artist, known for her ongoing interest in Realism, explores the boundaries of 'constructed photography' within a constructed-or 'fake'-space. The images are taken in and around Los Angeles, a landscape that is continually re-fictionalized through film. Using the tropes of constructed photography: the tableaux, the pictorially unified, enclosed space with no 'outside' suggested (as opposed to the fragmented, instantaneity of traditional documentary photography), Levene sought to "create an ambiguity of construction, a flat substance-less landscape of diversion and abstraction."
In Slavoj Zizek's "Welcome to the Desert of the Real", the author describes a merging of 'real life' with film and media imagery. He discusses the virtualization of life, and products deprived of their substance: coffee without caffeine, alcohol-free beer, virtual sex, or war without casualties. "In late capitalist-consumerist society, 'real social life' somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in real life like stage actors and extras." In this way, the subjects of Levene's series seem simultaneously staged and authentic: one can easily detect the sterile nature of a impeccably manicured shrub, or the contrived perfection of a roadside attraction.
Media
Schedule
from October 14, 2010 to December 03, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-10-14 from 18:00 to 20:00