Jennifer Lanski
Places: Famous and Ordinary
5-29 September 2019
OPENING RECEPTION
3-5pm
Sunday, 8 September, 2019
LA Artcore is pleased to present Places: Famous and Ordinary, Jennifer Lanski’s first solo exhibition of drawings and photographs with the gallery. Lanski’s drawings and other projects often appear traditional at first glance and then reveal their social or critical component upon deeper consideration. Her work is frequently serial in nature and possesses underlying humor. Often in a project, a seemingly rigid structural system must stretch under unanticipated or uncontrollable conditions.
In her Time/Temperature series, Lanski drew outside each day, determining the number of minutes spent drawing by the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. The materials Lanski used interacted with the weather, making each drawing both a visual representation of an actual moment in time and place, and also a document reflecting the experience of its own making. Drawing outside gives the project a performative element: by placing herself in public view every day for a year to do her work, Lanski effectively moved the private studio out into public space. One motivating idea behind the work is the exploration of what it means to be an artist in the world in the 21st century. Allowing the public to engage daily with a practicing artist and see the creative process, both over the course of one drawing and a span of 12 months, led to spontaneous interactions that can often be found in the text in each drawing.
In the artist’s Famous Places series, Lanski represents a famous place through drawings of figures photographing that place isolated against an absent background. Though the place is visually absent, its implied presence is represented in a variety of ways, as the nature of representation itself is explored. The photographing figures depicted are simultaneously capturing the place where they are and separating themselves from being fully present by mediating their experience through a screen.
In the National Park series, Lanski’s recent photographic prints of digital collages, numerous found photos taken by tourists and all including the same sign are combined into one image, leading to the partial obliteration or disappearance of the visitors and revealing their transience compared to the sign and landscape. Like in Famous Places, this series again explores the ways we experience and represent a landscape, a monument, or a work of art itself.
Jennifer Lanski is a Los Angeles based artist who earned her BA from Yale and her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. She is a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and several Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Grants. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in such venues as Brand Library and Art Center (Glendale, California), Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, South Bend Museum of Art (South Bend, Indiana), Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and Artower Agora (Athens, Greece), with a previous solo show at Proxy Gallery (Culver City, California).