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Pilar Corrias Gallery is delighted to present The Confectioner’s
Confectioner, an exhibition of new work by Leigh Ledare.
Leigh Ledare is an artist working with photography, archives, video and
text. Ledare’s first solo show at the gallery centres around a unique body
of work which forms an archive of the artist’s relationship with his mother
whilst creating a discursive site. As such the exhibition traces the
negotiation of their respective relationships to agency, representation,
self-presentation, and authorship, alongside issues proposed by the
enactment of the contents of this project in the context of the real world.
At the age of fifty, already having begun to cultivate a highly sexualised
persona, Ledare’s mother, Tina Peterson, a former professional ballerina,
approached her son to document her for posterity. Occupying the main
gallery, the resulting photographs exist neither as a diaristic work, nor
simply as portraits of a highly sexualised persona, but as an investigation
of the nature of our formation as subjects and its relation to broader
shifting cultural forces. Shown alongside texts and archived ephemera,
Ledare’s portraits of his mother reveal subversive responses, instances of
sexuality and vulnerability tactically deployed to multiple economic,
personal and psychological ends. Ledare proposes that his mother’s
complex subjectivity stems not from a failure to perform a multitude of
various roles, but from a simultaneous occupation of an abundance of
imagined modes, rooted in the performative, that cannot be reconciled.
In the lower gallery, the continuous shifts between the performative and
the real, and the public and the private are played out in three video
works screened in London for the very first time. Shown together in close
succession, Shoulder, The Model andThe Gift (all 2008) explore the
agency carried as artist/muse, son/mother/, archivist/performer. The
latter work The Gift was created from existing video footage originally
intended for a soft-core commercial fetish video shot by Ledare’s mother
and two family friends. The tapes were sent unsolicited to the artist on
condition that he create something with the otherwise discarded material.
Ledare responded by editing out all aspects of the filmaker’s original
intention, making visible the real armature for the filmaker’s missing
narrative.
The various registers of authorship related to the roles of model and
photographer are further explored in the Personal Commissions series of
2008 in which the artist answered personal ads placed by women whose
desires echoed those of his mother’s, and paid them to photograph him
in their homes, in a scenario of their choice. Complicating this body of
work are a number of photographs from a series entitled Collector’s
Commissions in which a selection of collectors were invited to photograph
Ledare within the context of their own art collection. These works bring
the nature of the solicitation in these situations to the fore, exposing the
differences in both the creation of value and the extraction of surplus
value from each situation.
The Confectioner’s Confectioner serves as an investigation of how we are
formed as subjects, not merely at the level of our own identities but also
at the level of our desires, aspirations and needs – drives which often
carry conflicting material, psychological and ethical demands.
Born in Seattle, Washington in 1976, Leigh Ledare received his MFA from
Columbia University in 2008. A major solo exhibition of the artist’s work,
Pretend You’re Actually Alive, was held at Les Rencontres de Arles, Arles,
France in 2009. Ledare has also exhibited at the Swiss Institute New York
(2009); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2008); International Center of
Photography, New York (2008); and Prague Biennale (2009). Leigh Ledare
lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles. He is currently Visiting
Professor of Photography and Media at California Institute for the Arts.
For further information and images please contact
Isabella Maidment: isabella@pilarcorrias.com
Pilar Corrias Gallery
54 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EF
Tel +44 (0)20 7323 7000 info@pilarcorrias.com
www.pilarcorrias.com
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