James Franco presented by Douglas Gordon
Psycho Nacirema

6-10 Lexington Street, London, W1F 0LB
6 June – 3 August 2013

Pace is delighted to present Psycho Nacirema, an exhibition featuring multi-media installations by the American artist and actor James Franco and presented by the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. Psycho Nacirema will be on view at Pace London, 6-10 Lexington Street, from 6 June to 3 August. It will be Franco’s first major exhibition in the UK.

Psycho Nacirema presents a mise-en-scène of director Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller Psycho, remodelling the infamous Bates Motel where the intrigue of the film takes place, intertwined with the 1920’s Arbuckle scandal.

The artists first collaborated on Rebel, an exhibition presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2012. In Rebel, Franco acted as a producer for Gordon, while in this exhibition Gordon has acted as a curator and teacher for Franco.

In Psycho Nacirema, James Franco uses the motel structure as both a physical and literal framework, reinterpreting iconic scenes from the original film through evocative details such as the motel neon signage or the infamous shower room where the film character Marion Crane, is murdered. One of Gordon’s most well-known works is 24 Hour Psycho (1993), a projection of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film slowed down to last an entire day which also sparked inspiration for the exhibition.

Franco’s installations heighten the psychological entrapment set out by Hitchcock, beckoning the audience to become a participating character within the plot. Split Marion, 2013 a diptych mirror installation, prompts the viewer to join the artist to gaze and be gazed upon, projecting themselves as the characters of Marion Crane and Norman Bates. Compelled to identify with them, the audience is forced to recognise their own neurosis and psychological inadequacies generated by the silver-screen.

Psycho Nacirema makes numerous trans-historical juxtapositions. Principally using Hitchcock’s film as a starting reference, Franco twists it together with the real-life scandal of Fatty Arbuckle, the Hollywood star and first one-million-dollar paid actor charged with the death of the American model and silent film actress Virginia Rappe in September 1921. The Arbuckle case was filled with murky evidence and media speculations which shed a harsh light on the cinema industry.

Franco’s fascination with the subject leads to the final room of the exhibition. A four-way projected film which shows the re-enactment of the scenario that supposedly took place in Room 1219 where Arbuckle was found with Rappe who was mysteriously injured and distressed. Marrying the Psycho thriller with the Arbuckle scandal, the exhibition performs interplay of reality with fiction, compelling the viewers to address how cinema is entrenched in the modern collective consciousness.

“Film is the medium that employs all art forms, but it is contained within the screen. We take this multi-form idea and pull it through the screen, so that the different forms are once again fully dimensional and a new nexus of interaction and significance is created. In this show, we go back to the original locations and images of Psycho and alter them so that once again the viewer's relationship with the material changes. One becomes an actor when interacting with this work. Film becomes raw material and is sculpted into new work.”  James Franco, May 2013.

Psycho Nacirema will be accompanied by a catalogue that features a discussion between both artists   and Russell Ferguson, Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programmes and Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Notes to Editors

James Franco

James Franco, (b. 1978, Palo Alto, CA) is considered a leading actor of his generation as well as being a multitalented writer and visual artist. Drawing from his experience in film and television work, Franco has produced a body of video works, multimedia installations, and large-scale sculptures. His conceptual artworks range across media including painting, drawing, film, sculpture, installation and photography.

He’s been in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Franco holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Brooklyn College and is currently a graduate film student at Tisch School for the Arts at New York University and a PhD candidate at Yale University. He also studies poetry at Warren Wilson College. He lives and works in New York & Los Angeles.

Douglas Gordon

Using films and complex large-scale video installations, photographs, texts and objects for his work, Douglas Gordon (b. 1966, Glasgow) questions the viewer’s subjectivity and the prescription of meaning to experiences. He frequently uses cinema and video as a medium, often installing it with a sculptural outlook. Gordon was educated at the Glasgow School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. He was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 1996 and represented the Britain at the Venice Biennal in 1997. He lives and works in Berlin.

Gordon’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in museums worldwide including Tate Britain, London; The National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy; the Museum für Moderne Kurnst Frankfurt am Maim, Germany; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain; the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Repulic; and most recently the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel.

Douglas Gordon' film works have been invited to the Festival de Cannes, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Venice Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival among many others.

In 2008 Gordon was Juror at the 65th International Venice Film Festival, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice and in 2012 he was the Jury president of Cinema XXI at the 07th Rome Film Festival, Festival Internazionale del Film di Roma, Rome.

Pace

Pace is a leading contemporary art gallery representing many of the most significant international artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries. Founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960 and led by Marc Glimcher, Pace has been a constant, vital force in the art world and has introduced many renowned artists’ work to the public for the first time. Pace has mounted more than 700 exhibitions, including scholarly exhibitions that have subsequently travelled to museums, and published nearly 400 exhibition catalogues. Today Pace has seven locations worldwide: four in New York; two in London; and one in Beijing. Pace inaugurated its flagship gallery at 6 Burlington Gardens with the exhibition Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes in the autumn of 2012.

Pace London at 6-10 Lexington Street is open to the public from Monday to Saturday, from 10 AM to 6 PM: www.pacegallery.com

This exhibition has been produced by Commonwealth Projects

Commonwealth Projects has focused on the highest levels of sophistication throughout years spent on an unconventional path. A creative studio eagerly facilitating collaboration between artists, designers, and thinkers, CWP has partnered with Hedi Slimane, the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty Conservation Institute etc. 

---

 

For press inquiries, please contact:

London: Nicolas Smirnoff, nicolas@pacegallery.com / +44 20 3206 7613 
New York: Madeline Lieberberg, mlieberberg@pacegallery.com / +1 212 421 8987

Image:   Douglas Gordon, Portrait of James, 1966 © Studio lost but found / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013
Photo: Studio lost but found / Katharina Kiebacher

follow Pace on Twitter  |  friend on Facebook  |  follow Pace on Instagram

If you’re using Outlook, please make sure you click on the button located at the top of this email to display the images. 
Thank you