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Galerie Anita Beckers: LAUREL NAKADATE - 26 Aug 2011 to 7 Jan 2012 Current Exhibition |
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Laurel Nakadate, Exorcism in January, 2009
C-Print 30 x 40 inches, Edition of 10 |
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LAUREL NAKADATE Videos and Photographs August 26th – January, 2012 Opening: August 25th, 2011, at 7 pm 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. The exhibition features a new series of short videos projected or displayed on a monitor. In these works, ritualized exorcisms are performed by Nakadate and her cast of amateur actors. Locations shift from dingy, claustrophobic motel rooms to the majestic open spaces of the American West. There are ecstatic dances, woodland walks, train travels, and reluctant stripteases. Unwanted feelings and bad memories are cast away. The show also includes a variety of photographs: the FEVER DREAMS series, large images that Nakadate shot while making her videos and the LUCKY TIGER series, small snapshots in which she appears in suggestive poses inspired by 1950s-style cheesecake and camera-club photos. These snapshots were completed during a performance in which the artist and anonymous middle-aged men, enlisted via Craigslist.com, covered their hands with fingerprinting ink and touched the photographs together. Sitting in a circle, on the floor of one man’s living room, they passed the snapshots around, like trading cards. We are also pleased to present a variety of 365 DAYS: A CATALOGUE OF TEARS, a series of 365 colorphotographs documenting a performance by Laurel Nakadate, in which she photographed herself before, during and after weeping each day from January 1st through December 31st, 2010. 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. Nakadate says that the photographs were inspired by the “happy self-portraits people make day after day with their cell phone cameras and post on Facebook”. The images of the 2006 originated series BELLOCQ show Nakadate posing. Her face is smeared and covered with black color, in reference to the black and white photographs by Ernest J. Bellocq of New Orleans Storyville prostitutes he made in 1912. 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. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Berkeley Art Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Asia Society in New York and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and her works are in the collections of the The Museum of Modern Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Princeton University Art Museum. Nakadate has also received widespread acclaim for her two feature-length films, STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE, which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and THE WOLF KNIFE, which was recently nominated for a 2010 Gotham Award and a 2011 Independent Spirit Award. Images: Courtesy of Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt |
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