NYAB Event - Laurel Nakadate "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears"

Laurel Nakadate "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears"

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

This event has ended.

We are pleased to present 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears (2011), a series of photographs documenting a performance by Laurel Nakadate, in which she photographed herself before, during and after weeping each day from January 1 through December 31, 2010. Three hundred sixty-five color photographs measuring 8-1/2 x 11 inches each will be installed in the main gallery. The exhibition will also include a new video piece, a gothic mystery set in the historic reception rooms of the Park Avenue Armory, which combines the simplicity of 1970s-style performance actions with the staging of the Grand Guignol. The video was created with the assistance of the Art Production Fund, which is also currently sponsoring a presentation of Nakadate's videos in their ongoing series at the Standard Hotels in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills.

During the past decade, Laurel Nakadate has become internationally known for provocative works in video, film, performance and photography. Complex and often unsettling, they challenge conventional perceptions of power, seduction, tenderness, trust, betrayal, narcissism and self-abnegation in psychosexual relationships.

While completing her MFA in photography at Yale University from 1999 to 2001, Nakadate began to create photographs and video pieces that involved interactions with older men she met through chance encounters. In these works, her relationship to the fixed single viewpoint of the camera (as both artist and subject), her insistence on simple production values, and her upending of public and private ritualistic behaviors, anticipated the amateur video aesthetic of YouTube diaries and internet blogs. Conversely, Nakadate says that the photographs in 365 Days were inspired by the "happy self-portraits people make day after day with their cell phone cameras and post on Facebook," while also dissecting the increasingly popular practice of objectifying one's interior life on line via social media sites.

In his cover story on Nakadate, published in the March 2011 issue of Modern Painters, the novelist Rick Moody writes:

This is the story on the Web, in millions upon millions of blogs, and Facebook pages, and online sites advocating activities both wholesome and dangerous. The bulk of these online photographs of strangers, these accounts of self, are bad, are awkward, dimly lit, haphazard, consumer-grade, hopeless and Nakadate plays with and against this constructed femininity.

Nakadate's performance was a disciplined, durational exercise that required her to "take part in sadness each day" during the normal course of her life. Photographs were made in her New York apartment, her childhood bedroom in Iowa, at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, and on planes, trains and in hotel rooms in places as varied as Talinn, Estonia, and Saratoga Springs, New York.

Approximately one third of the images in the series are currently displayed as large-scale prints measuring 40 x 50 inches each, in Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely, a ten-year survey of photography, video and film, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, on view at MoMA PS 1 through August 8, 2011. In a recent review of the exhibition for The New York Times, Ken Johnson describes the series as "tapping into a river of grief and loneliness running under the surface of American life."

Laurel Nakadate was born in Austin, Texas in 1975 and raised in Ames, Iowa. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University in 1998 and completed her MFA at Yale University in 2001.

[Image: Laurel Nakadate "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears" (2011) January 16, 2010 Type C print 40 x 50 in.]