Miller Updegraff
dal 14/9/2012 al 26/10/2012
Segnalato da
14/9/2012
Miller Updegraff
Michael Benevento, Los Angeles
The solo exhibition features paintings, drawings and video by Los Angeles based artist.
Michael Benevento is pleased to present a solo exhibition featuring paintings, drawings and video by Los Angeles based artist Miller Updegraff.
The artist's most recent body of work explores subjects though the associations and tangents arising in the research process itself. As a result the work also examines authorship and removal, authenticity and displacement. The defined subjects here include Koloman Moser, Thomas Mann, George Grosz and Konstantin Raudive – individuals from the past who serve as touchstones within the work - as much as the way each are filtered through the artist's subjectivity.
Figures - some once prominent, some obscure - appear as painterly portraits across a series of oval canvases to reveal associative connections between a cast of characters: a man standing alongside his funereal mask, an invalid, a headless wanderer, a message written backwards, a disembodied eye peering through slats in a gate.
Updegraff's drawings evidence a similar concern, often mining and reordering through a personal filter, particular historical figures as subjects of inquiry. Here, the artist draws on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and the concept of the séance - an attempt to communicate with someone lost to history. Collapsing questions of time, occultism, the parapsychological and relations between ethnography and voyeurism, Updegraff's practice pushes multiple levels of inquiry towards an individual search for meaning.
Miller Updegraff lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Clifton Benevento (NY), Angles Gallery (CA), Torrance Art Museum (CA) and Berkeley Art Museum (CA). Writing on Updegraff has appeared on Artforum.com, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and Artscene. He holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Florida. This is his second solo exhibition at Michael Benevento.
Image: The storm cellar, 2012. Watercolor pencil on paper, 14" x 17"
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 15th 6-8 pm.
Michael Benevento
7578 Sunset Blvd. LA, CA 90046
Gallery hours are 10am - 5pm, Tuesday-Saturday