Lucy Levene "L.A. Stories"

511 Gallery

poster for Lucy Levene "L.A. Stories"

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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

Artist(s)

Lucy Levene

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