OCTOBER 27 – DECEMBER 8, 2012
Artist's Reception: Saturday, October 27, 6-9 PM
Luis de Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present the work of Los Angeles based artist Ken Gonzales- Day in his first solo exhibition at the gallery. Entitled Profiled | Hang Trees | Portraits, the exhibition brings together three inter-related and yet very different projects for the first time.
The exhibition begins with a selection from his Searching for California Hang Trees series, which has been featured in a number of exhibitions and publications including the Generali Foundation’s Exile of the Imaginary, LACMA’s Phantom Sightings, Spy Numbers at the Palais de Tokyo, and will be included in Our America, an upcoming exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution. These sometimes beautiful images of the California landscape disrupt conventional readings of the landscape photography once the viewer realizes that these sites may have been part of California’s little known history of lynching.
The exhibition will also include a small selection of contemporary portraits of Latino men, taken in connection with Gonzales-Day’s own research, which revealed that Latino men were disproportionately targeted by California’s lynch mobs in the nineteenth century. And lastly, and generated in direct response to the challenges of representing such complex and troubling histories, the exhibition will conclude with a selection of images from Gonzales-Day’s recent LACMA PAC Prize award-winning monograph, Profiled. With this project, once-living subjects have been replaced with their sculptural doubles to create a new critical space from which to consider not only the objects portrayed, but the sometimes curious histories which brought them into being in the first place.
Profiled assembles depictions of race and difference drawn from the sculpture and portrait bust collections of museums in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. In doing so, the project also reveals the emergence of whiteness as an aesthetic canon that dates from the eighteenth century but continues into the present. Profiled is not a history of sculpture, rather, it is a conceptual clustering of cultural artifacts arranged to foreground the emergence, idealization and even the folly of race. And as such, Profiled, strives to create a new context from which to consider these sometimes-ambiguous objects.
As the Pulitzer prize winning art critic Mark Feneeny wrote:
What Gonzales-Day records is a much larger form of racial profiling, though, than the sort practiced by law-enforcement personnel. For centuries, Western art has operated under a certain set of assumptions about what did, and did not, constitute beauty. Those assumptions simultaneously shaped and reflected even larger assumptions about human value. The fact that the classically-inspired statuary was considered art, while renderings of African, Native American, and other non-Western people were assigned to the category of anthropology, speaks volumes. Seeing two such images juxtaposed within the same frame is to witness a cross-cultural dialogue all the more eloquent for its silence.
The exhibition begins with the history of lynching, but with the inclusion of the Profiled series, it extends the discussion to the persistence of racial profiling in contemporary society and highlights inconsistencies in the emergence of race as a discourse, and echos the artist’s ongoing interest in the history of racial formation, first touched on in his first book, Lynching in the West (Duke, 2006), and carried through into Profiled (LACMA, 2011). Profiled is about how these sculptural depictions, often rendered with outdated aesthetic and ideological models, have become all but illegible to contemporary viewers. Cast, carved, burned, and broken, they are shadows of people that once lived in this world or in the imaginations of their makers and span everything from memorials to emperors to Orientalist follies, and serve to track our ever-changing understanding of aesthetics and difference.
About Ken Gonzales-Day
Gonzales-Day is the Chair of the Art Department and Professor at Scripps College, where he has taught since 1995. Gonzales-Day has had numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, from Los Angeles to New York, and Paris to Singapore. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), Eileen Harris Norton Foundation (Santa Monica), Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum National d’Histoire naturelle (Paris), Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution - American Art Museum, among others.
For more information about Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, please go to
http://www.luisdejesus.com
For additional information about Ken Gonzales-Day, please contact:
Ricky Lee
PRESS SECRETARIAT
ricky@presssecretariat.org
