Hammer Museum Presents Three Exhibitions

Tuesday, 09 August 2005 12:03

LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Hammer Museum presents three exhibitions featuring two newly commissioned video installations by artists Patty Chang and Fiona Tan as well as The Biographical Landscape of Stephen Shore, 1968-1993, the first U.S. presentation of an extensive selection of photographs by Stephen Shore. Collectively, the exhibitions will allow visitors to explore the work of an established artist whose images of the American landscape brought color photography to high art status in the 1970s alongside the most recent ambitious works by two emerging talents who are moving beyond photography to redefine the use of video in contemporary art today. All three exhibitions will be on view simultaneously. The installations by Patty Chang and Fiona Tan are the first Hammer Museum presentations of works commissioned by the Three M Project, a series of projects jointly developed by and presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, with the purpose of stimulating the creation of new work by artists not yet known in the United States. The third artist in the group of initial commissions is Aernout Mik, whose video installation will be on view at the Hammer Museum in 2006. PATTY CHANG - Patty Chang: Shangri-La examines the concept of Shangri-La, the mythical hamlet of James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon. The novel and the subsequent 1937 film by Frank Capra propelled the notion of Shangri-La into the collective cultural vocabulary. In 1997, a rural farming town in South Central China near the Tibetan border declared itself the place upon which Shangri-La was based. FIONA TAN - Fiona Tan: Correction is an extensive video installation comprising approximately 300 video portraits of inmates and guards from four U.S. prisons projected on six hanging screens. In Correction, Tan portrays a cross-section of people who inhabit prisons, drawing attention to the multitude of citizens whom society prefers to keep out of sight. Each forty-second portrait features an anonymous inmate or guard standing as still as possible in front of the camera as they are filmed framed from the waist up, a reference to the Amerikanische Einstellung (the American shot) technique used in Hollywood in the 30's, 40's and 50's. Seen on large hanging screens, the images confront the viewer as powerful photographic portraits in motion. The work reveals Tan’s interest in incorporating sociological and anthropological principles into the relationship between the still and moving image. STEPHEN SHORE - The Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968–1993 presents a rare opportunity to study the rich color prints and photographic projects of one of the most prominent and influential American photographers to emerge in the last half-century. The exhibition comprises approximately 120 works from Stephen Shore’s key series, American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, as well as his later landscape photographs. At the heart of the exhibition is Uncommon Places, Shore’s quintessential series on the American vernacular landscape photographed between 1973 and 1982. The Biographical Landscape illuminates the evolution of Shore’s influential work and gives a full picture of Shore’s articulate and groundbreaking use of large format photography as well as his great contribution to photography in the late 20th century.

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