Katy Grannan
dal 8/9/2005 al 4/11/2005
Segnalato da
Fifty One Fine Art Photography
8/9/2005
Katy Grannan
Fifty One Fine Art Photography, Antwerp
Mystic Lake. The artist features portraits of ordinary people exposing themselves, physically and psychologically, in public settings. All of the subjects were unknown to Grannan and some are respondents to ads the artist placed in local newspapers; he empowers them to suggest poses, locations, and states of undress.
Mystic Lake
Fifty One Fine Art Photography is pleased to present the exhibition of
new work by Katy Grannan. Like the previous series, Mystic Lake features
portraits of ordinary people exposing themselves, physically and
psychologically, in public settings. All of the subjects were unknown to
Grannan and some are respondents to ads the artist placed in local
newspapers. Grannan empowers them to suggest poses, locations, and
states of undress. Each project explores the desire to be immortalized
in a still image and Grannan does this in a rich and complex way, she
photographs a wide variety of portrait sitters with frankness, while
also maintaining their mystery.
Grannan continues portrait photography in a highly personal style. Her
portraits swing from referencing Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or
Edouard Manet to mimicking pin-ups or fashion photographs. Her subjects
are not aristocrats or stars, but rather unknown middleclass Americans
who call her to transform them, if only for a day. This fusion gives
them an awkward familiarity. They ultimately fail, however, to be either
a traditional portrait commission or an image for the glossies.
The works of the new color series entitled "Mystic River" are
large-scale c-prints and were all made outdoors. In the final images
public space is transformed into private theatre. In this body of work,
the illusion is no longer one of being a glamorous airbrushed model, but
rather the fantasy becomes the act of being photographed. Grannan has
snapped the picture before they got comfortable, and long before they
developed any confidence in their first-time performance as models.
Grannan's process is quick; each portrait is taken within the short span
of three hours. She gives her subjects little instruction. The
photographs are deliberate yet not highly staged.
Previously the black and white series entitled "Morning Call" consisted
of small scale portraits made in the private homes of her sitters.
Grannan began this series around Allentown, PA and photographs the
inhabitants and interiors of an area documented by Walker Evans in the
1930s and 40s. She also uses a documentary style in a subjective
description of the complex psychological landscape of her sitters and
the dynamic between the artist and her subject.
The power of these images lies in the uneasy relationship between a
romantic notion of art’s ability to transcend the everyday and the
awkward reality that we are all exactly who we are no matter when,
where, or how we are represented.
Katy Grannan received her BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and
her MFA from Yale University. The artist has exhibited at the
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, The Palm
Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, CA, The Orange County Museum of Art, LA, CA, and The International
Center of Photography, NY, among others. Her work is in the collections
of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Whitney Museum, NY, The
Guggenheim Museum, NY and the National Museum of Women in the Arts,
Washington D.C., and has been featured in ArtForum, Frieze, Flash Art,
and The New York Times Magazine, among others.
Her monograph "Model American " is being published by Aperture and will
be released early September
Fifty one Fine Art Photography
Zirkstraat 20
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium