Kevin Hanley
Seams Like Sometimes
January 9 - February 6, 2010
January 9 - February 6, 2010
Download Printable PDF (35 K)KEVIN HANLEY
Seams Like Sometimes
ACME., Los Angeles
January 9 – February 6
I-20, New York
January 16 – February 20, 2010
Most recently, Kevin Hanley's work was included in Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection, The Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
The title of Kevin Hanley's current installation at ACME. is "Seams Like Sometimes," at once a typographical error and an appropriate heading for the series of photographs, wall murals and text pieces that comprise this exhibition. Not only is the process of confronting a "typo"--an impasse that derails the linear act of reading--identical to the temporal play with which Hanley's practice has always been concerned, but these seams of time describe a photographic body of work that is focused more on "extraction" than anything that seems to deal with issues of representation.
As in some of Hanley's earlier work, color is extracted from photographs and through printing grows into retinal fields, taking forms ranging from monochrome prints to graphically rhythmic wall coverings. The pictures themselves are at once mere snapshots, in that they are subjects taken as small memorials on a phone camera, but they also serve as a thematic (as well as visual) palette, in that all the subjects depicted have in common the fact that the "nature" of each exists between more than one definition of being; these subjects include performers (existing between individual and public), sea lions (air and water), gardens (production and "nature") and a phone camera glitch that breaks up then reorders the intended photo subject . Furthermore, the decision to employ snapshots hinges between the universality of the camera phone (as the most current and common means of recording images) and activating the itinerant nature of an image-making process that is itself always in transit. An additional photographic suite of four near identical portraits of identical twins keeps the viewer in a serial game, continually turning in on itself at the moment of potentially distinguishing an individual subject.
Wall coverings derived from the photographs take the form of diagonal stripes, a vinyl application in the design of splattered paint, and a multi-colored pattern of a building block extracted from basic forms of the English alphabet. These walls become optically charged surfaces on which to hang a relative photo, while the patterns themselves also function in the exhibition as fugitive sculpture: there are the custom garments Hanley has manufactured and hired performers to wear at the exhibition's opening, on display in the gallery for only that window of time, and then going wherever the bodies go that don them. A final text piece consists of comedy bits written by Hanley that are applied at the main entrance and restroom doors of the gallery. While these texts humorously ponder time in the innocuous tone of a stand-up routine, they contain the potential to create a real temporal obstacle, as a visitor who stops to read the text physically interferes with the coming and going of others.
Another set of prints is derived from low-resolution footage of violent camera movements. They are in fact a montage of various irked celebrities smacking cameras from the hands of paparazzi. This collection of footage, in which subjects are physically adverse to the camera pointed at them, provides a continuation of Hanley's long-standing interest in works that utilize cameras that are disembodied in the most material possible way. Locating a surplus source of imagery from the act of "recognition" upon which celebrity culture is contingent, this literal take on collision montage exists right in the middle of mass media.
Kevin Hanley's group shows include the 15th anniversary group exhibition, ACME. (2009); Die Jugend von Heute, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2006): Superstar: From Warhol to Madonna, Vienna Kunsthalle, Austria (2005); Threesixty, Artspeak, Vancouver, Canada (2005); Power: Play, the V2 Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2005); Cine y Casi Cine, Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2005); Uneasy Space, SITE Sante Fe (2003); and the 50th Venice Biennale, Italy (2003). The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.
"Seams Like Sometimes" featuring work by Hanley completed between 2008 and 2009, will be on display from January 9, through February 6, 2010 at ACME 6150 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90048.