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NEWS Solo Exhibitions
Group Exhibitions 2007 “A House Is Not A Home,” curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody, Caren Golden Fine Art, NYC July 9th - August 17, 2007, reception July 12th, 2007 “Contemporary Photography Exhibition,” Daniel Azoulay Gallery, Miami, Fl., June 30-August 29, 2007 “Photo Femmes,” Caren Golden Fine Art, NYC, NY, November 30, 2006 - January 6, 2007 Reception: Thursday, November 30, 6 - 8 PM Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present PHOTO FEMMES, an exhibition of photo-based works by six women artists. Whether using the photographic medium to investigate the real or to create the imaginary, they reside in an era of mass communication which forms a common cultural prism through which their art is viewed.
Public Art MTA Photo Light Box Series - 2006-2009 Public Art Review, Public Art 2.0, issue 41, fall/winter, 2009 http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_plll.htm Metro Orange Line - Permanent Public Art Project Valley College Station - 2003-2005 As station artist, Laura designed terrazzo paving areas and porcelain enamel steel panels to be fabricated and installed on station platforms. The art panel designs are black and white contemporary portraits shot in historic locations of rock ‘n’ roll history that took place in the San Fernando Valley. The images reference the styles and fashions of the times in which these events took place. One photograph was shot at the former location of the Devonshire Downs Racetrack, where the Newport ’69 Festival took place on June 20-22, headlined by Jimi Hendrix, The Animals, Marvin Gaye and others. It was also formerly the original Valley College location now Cal State University Northridge. The other photograph was taken at the former Franklin Canyon location of a Rolling Stones album cover Big Hits High Tides and Green Grass, shot in 1969. “My artwork is closely aligned to the practice of narrative and documentary style photography in which the photographer has a personal connection to its subject matter.” http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_olvcll.htm
Publications National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2009, Calendar for Exhibition, “Modern Love: Gifts to the Collection from Heather and Tony Podesta,” National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Home, “Opening Gambit,” July/August Issue 2007, p.100, (Illus.) Art Fairs Photo Miami, Daniel Azoulay Gallery, 2007
Auctions Re: PRESENT ~ LACE Annual Benefit Art Auction; a celebration of the moment representing three decades of excellence with a toast to the future May 22, 2008 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibits (LACE) The REFCO Collection of Contemporary Photography, Christies, Rockefeller Plaza, NYC, NY. Tuesday April 23, Friday May 5 & Wednesday May 10, 2006, Christie's New York, New York Catalogue Lot 167
REVIEWS Laura London Photography: The Youth Dilemma London’s photographs of young subjects express the rules of engagement of contemporary teenagers, and depict a new embodiment of culture. Seeking their own meaning and identity, in a cross-cultural synonymy, they shape their illusions, their truths, their morality, through epic ordeals and heroic quests. These youthful subjects reveal themselves by their bodily actions and their defiant poses, creating a crucial taxonomy of signs. We can grasp their anxiety, their struggles, their sensuality, their ultimate inner mystery. London appropriates their crucial reality well, transforming them into iconic profiles of our contemporary society. Read entire article from wam-magazine.com. Interview with Laura London Contemporary Artist/Photographer, Stay Thirsty Media, Jan. 4, 2009 Thirsty caught up with Laura London in Los Angeles where she has lived and worked for the last sixteen years. L.A., its youth culture and rock n’ roll have heavily influenced her work which Los Angeles Times critic Holly Myers has called “the most casual and naturalistic sense of looking in at private moments in the lives of today’s youth culture.” Her first solo show in Miami runs from January 10 to February 10, 2009 at the Daniel Azoulay Gallery in Miami, Florida and the works featured relate thematically to the ideas of personal identity, youth culture and rock n’ roll. Read the entire article here: http://www.staythirstymedia.com/200901-029/html/200901-laura-london-int.html. Laura London: Photographs based on youth culture, and Rock & Roll by Cara Bloch, Jan. 6, 2009 Laura London! Laura London! Doesn't that sound that a rock star name to begin with? Like Joan Jett, Tennessee Thomas (from The Like), Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, and Jenny Jones (the early 90's talk show host???!!!!???) you must love the all alliteration in these strong female superstars! Read the entire article here: http://www.lipsticktracez.com/cara/2009/01/laura-london-photographs-based.php. Public Art Review / US Recent Projects, volume 18, no.2 issue 36, page 90, 2007 Initiated in 2001, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Metro Art Lightbox Program places the work of photo-based artists in illuminated boxes at Metro train stations (along the Red Line). The most recent additions to the series, installed in 2006, include creations by artists Sam Erenberg, Colette Fu, Laura London, and Peter Goin. Pictured above is Erenberg’s The Complete Works of Roland Barthes, which consists of digitally-altered photographs of seven Los Angeles artists holding books by Barthes. According to Erenberg, “The seven artists I chose (from twenty-two of the Los Angeles art community, as well as the city at large.” Fu’s Photo Binge is a collage of various binge activities: eating, exercising, shopping. London’s Couples, Groups and Friends comprises seven images depicting teenagers in social environments, urban landscapes, and dream settings. Goin’s Narrative Photograms are designed to reflect the journeys, passages, thresholds, and memories that define daily life. The program has drawn submissions from hundreds of photo-based artists nationwide. Past displays have included work by Robbert Flick, Eileen Cowin, Paul Groh, Charles La Belle, and Andrew Z. Glickman. Images of the installations are online at www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_photolightboxes.htm.
Artists Transform Metro Orange Line Into Work Of Art, 2005 [link to artwork] Opening October 29th, 2005 the Metro Orange Line will showcase artwork of 15 California artists. “This work is a tribute to the Valley," said Renée Petropoulos, who served as the lead artist on the project, "I envisioned artworks strewn across the Valley as jewels on a 14 mile necklace."
Spring/Summer, 2001 “Her Fave Raves” London, who teaches photography to teenagers in Los Angeles, is clearly able to get on the same wavelength as her adolescent model. “I like to work with issues of identity. A lot of my work is autobiographical and comes from my own memories, “London says, “I was around teenagers so much I started noticing how they were similar and dissimilar to me during different periods of their lives. I like to use a person to tell a story, sort of like a filmmaker. But my images are not documentary; they represent a search to identify the youth culture of this particular era.” London’s photographs look a bit like Cindy Sherman’s--that is if Sherman scoured the local mall for her surreal images and fixated on somebody other than herself as the ever-riveting subject. “I had seen a lot of Clancy and she appealed to me as a model because she was very strong and had a positive personality.” London explains, “Together, we picked the rock stars she was going to imitate.” Despite the celebrity-conscious title, Rock Star Moments was not shot at a trendy club, but taken in Clancy’s natural habitat (and teen haven)—her suburban Los Angeles bedroom and bathroom. They capture her both in full rock star regalia—over-the-top variations on the sex and sensibility theme—and in her more vulnerable moments, as she prepares herself for the various roles she’s about to inhabit. Call it Kabuki Candid Camera. Thers’s something equally subversive and innocent in these trumped-up images. Whether she’s got a face-full of smeared ruby lipstick, or is clean scrubbed but for the blood-red streaks she’s just put in her hair, this Lolita with the obviously stuffed bra inst taking any prisoners. At least not yet. Shades of Love “Its hard to say whether Courtney Love would embrace or hate this teen’s send up of her. “She somewhere between her grunge and glamour phases,” says London. “We edited out some other shots, where she’s showing her underwear and doing poses she saw Courtney do. They were too provocative” The guitar belongs to Clancy. Between Roles Clancy deconstructs her Image, seated with a dancerly grace that is more seductive than the In-your-face put-ons of her icon-interpretations. “This is a process shot,” says London. “She still has some makeup on and those are all the clothes spread everywhere. It’s very unkempt, and I like the energy of what is going on”. Not a Still from The Ice Storm Suburban teen, Christina Aguilera wannabe? Or both? “This was mocking a video. We talked about imitating it. One of my students saw this series and asked me, “What’s up with the Lolita? That’s not my intention. By showing the process of her dressing up I’m trying to tell a story. Everywhere you look you see media images. Its my responsibility to talk about what I see,” says London, who considers her work a dialogue. Trick or Treat Marilyn Manson should look so good. “We started the shoot around Halloween, so she was into dressing up anyway. She’s just finished dyeing her hair, and I like the imperfection of her hands getting all messy. When young girls dye their hair it is very experimental and I wanted to show that aspect. Clancy’s unusually intelligent and she’s not just buying into these images. She’s critiquing and criticizing them, having a good time and laughing.” Out of the Closet “She wants to be a fashion designer,“ says London. “She’s very, intrigued with the whole process and energy of what creates a rock star, model, icon, “Here she has donned a red wig, a la Shirley Manson (of Garbage), and padded her tube top” London mixed natural and artificial light and deliberately depicted her inside of her closet. “I pick locations for private moments you don’t usually get to see.” Caren Golden Fine Art
Los Angeles Times “London’s Photos Depict Teen Dreams, Fantasies” Clancy conveys all the trappings of contemporary glamour with ease: the adolescent indifference, the sultry posture, the detached gaze, the cool sexuality. She wears the costumes not as clothes but as psychological states, as though she’s internalized their logic. But there is nothing schizophrenic about Clancy’s performances in these pictures; rather, her ease in role playing is conveyed as a form of mastery. The sixth photograph in the series takes us behind the scenes. In this image, Clancy sits on the floor of her room, holding a red wig in one hand and sorting through piles of clothes with the other, out of character and not paying attention to the camera. It’s a charming and powerful moment in the series, not because it exposes a “real” Clancy underneath the adult disguises-it doesn’t–but because it exposes her as the clear-headed author of her own image. The remaining four photographs also depict Clancy out of character, in various states of costume. In the last image, she appears as a regular 13-year-old-girl in blue jeans and a tank top, although we are given no reason to believe that it is any truer an image than any of the others. It is to London’s credit that Clancy’s talent for shape-shifting is not presented as a sign of capriciousness or soulnessness but as a gesture of power. London centers Clancy in every image, shooting from eye level or near eye level. Clancy gazes directly (and dauntingly) into the camera in most of the shots, and in no case does she seem to have been caught unaware. London has not attempted to seize more than Clancy wants to give to the camera. The resulting effect is a charming camaraderie between the two, a sense of respectful cooperation that seems to have brought out the best in both of them. Works on Paper Inc.,
Robert Mahoney Laura London There’s something about teenage girls that seems so trivial, yet so deep. They can be sweet and cruel, goofy and serious, sexy and clueless. Photographer Laura London takes up Cindy Sherman’s idea of posing for the camera, but London uses teenage girls as models instead of herself. That’s not the only difference, however: London stresses inner complexity over visual clichés, even as she skirts those very clichés. It’s a dangerous game, but London by and large succeeds. The main reason is her collaboration with a 15-year-old Naomi, a punk rocker she met in 1996. The focus of this exhibition is the half-dozen or so photos that make up “True Self: Portraits,” which show Naomi before a dressing-room mirror in a posh Beverly Hills store. Naomi is exactly like one of those special teenage girls I described earlier; She’s physically mature, though somewhat awkward; cute, but with a dark side, earnest and always searching. She looks like a young Sandra Bernhard. London explores Naomi’s moods by carefully choosing wardrobe and setting. We see Naomi in a sexy leather outfit, with her head bowed in apparent doubt; angelic and ivory- shouldered in a fuchsia prom dress, capturing that moment when every father cries, squatting in halter dress, brandishing tattoos that spell out LOVE/HATE across her fingers (imitating Night of the Hunter?), while shadows and multiple reflections mirror some inner struggle. In another shot, she’s with one of the girls, in a back-to-school number, casually tossing off sexiness in a way guaranteed to torture make classmates. Elsewhere, she does an Ava Gardner twirl, showing off her underarms in a sleeveless The camera obviously loves Naomi, but I’m not sure whether the strength of “True Self: Portraits” lies solely with her or with London’s abilities as an artist. Whatever the reason, these photographs steal the show. Caren Golden Fine Art
Los Angeles Times “Worth Watching” There’s a touching lack of irony in these girls’ appropriation of punk’s rebellious, anti-establishment stance to express their “true selves,” since their neo-punk look of black mesh dresses, chunky platform boots, press-on tattoos and studded wristbands can all be purchased at the local Urban Outfitters. Like fashion’s glamorization of heroin chic, London’s teenagers glide along the razor’s edge between style and substance, where gritty authenticity is always threatening to slide into patently stylized transgression. It’s no coincidence that these girls’ search for personal identity dovetails perfectly with their entrance into the consumer marketplace. Yet, London seems as comfortable with these apparent contradictions as the hip generation of “riot grrrl” neo-feminists she portrays. Most of her images succeed in having it both ways: They could blend right into the editorial pages of a teen fashion magazine, but at the same time we’re uncomfortable watching these young women when they’re at their most vulnerable. London’s portraits beg comparison to the more well-known work of Sharon Lockhart, whose photographs capture a similar sense of being caught between two worlds. But where Lockhart’s models appear dreamy and transcendent, London’s streetwise teenagers are rooted in the here-and-now. They know they’re being looked at. Instead of playing up to the camera, their blank expressions mirror your desires back at you, their faces as unyielding as steel-plated armor. Works on Paper Inc.,
Peter Frank Whereas Laura London’s earlier photographs reveled in their own artifice, mocking and queering the stylized, exaggerated images and claims of clothing and beauty ads, these latest, markedly more poignant shots emphasize the individuality of their subjects, middle-class adolescent girls acting and interacting at home or in public spaces. Still, it is clear that London has set up at least some of these photos, artfully but unsubtly violating the camera-verite claim to documentary truth. London actually exercises as a “truth” of another kind, the narrative, even novelistic truth of observed and recalled experience. Whether she is watching these teens or posing them, London is obviously empathizing with them, recording their re-enactments of the kinds of personal and social rituals that marked her own coming of age. London “documents” one young lady in particular, a punkish and photogenic gamine who hangs with her homies and struts her stuff in front of a clothing store’s dressing-room mirror with equal grace, aplomb, vulnerability, girlishness, self-possession, etc. etc. The range of sensation she manages to project – or London projects through her – renders this mall-rat Audrey Hepburn the prefect modern-day everywoman-in-training. Work on Paper Inc.
Sarah Gavlak Teenage girls gathering in public bathrooms to apply make-up, smoke cigarettes, gossip about boys, music, and fashion is a common occurrence. Yet, when filtered through the camera of Los Angeles artist Laura London, who has been working with the subject over the last few years, there appears to be something not so matter of fact about these rituals of youth. In fact, there is something strange, or rather strained in these photos of young women at the onslaught of self-awareness and self-discovery that transcends the usual difficulty and awkwardness of adolescence. Young riot girls, hippie chicks and punk rockers sitting on the sidewalk sulking are not documented simply to illustrate this increasingly important demographic. Nor are they the work of a social anthropologist, who may observe the curious habits of girls spending hours in their bedroom playing guitar and giggling. Rather, London’s most recent images straddle the sociological and the physiological. They are staged fictions rooted in the girls’ social, emotional, and corporeal reality. The girls in London’s photographs are not models or aspiring young actresses, but her own students. They are inserted into a mise en scene which heightens the signifiers of an American adolescent world. The bedroom scene is an actual reproduction of the artist’s own teen retreat, down to the same exact sleeping bag on the bed. It is in such images that we really begin to understand London’s work within the context of filmmaking and within a broader movement of contemporary photography in which the photographic truth has been replaced in favor of fiction, fake narratives, and staged events. Like Cindy Sherman, Sharon Lockhart, and the teenage girl images of Sarah Jones and Dana Hoey, London directs every aspect of the photo shoot. Planning well in advance she scouts locations searching for public bathrooms with expressionistic graffiti, a gritty urban street corner, or the perfect sunlit park. She then works on costumes, creates special lighting, and dresses the set in order to amplify these sites of teen angst. While some of her photographs are quite involved and require much preparation, and others, such as the more traditional portraits require only the subject and special lighting. For example, several of the Polaroid’s depict solitary illuminated silhouettes or cropped figures that emerge hauntingly from a black background. Inspired by the 17th century Dutch painting, Untitled (studio portrait with Vermeer lighting), portrays a girl with the hair color and highlights of the moment almost magically appearing from the velvet background, her intense red hair shimmering like fire. “ I first saw her when she was sixteen, in the early summer.” London first spotted Naomi, a punk rock girl of about fifteen, in the summer of 1996. Fascinated by her tough exterior, vampish makeup, and torn stockings, the artist incorporated her into this ongoing photographic project. During the process of working with Naomi, London discovered that beneath her hard shell lies a sweet young thing. And like Freud who was hired to discover the fugitive inner life of young Dora, London has taken it upon herself to continue her investigation into the inner lives of her young subjects by making Naomi her own case study. In the series “True-Self: Portraits 1-6 London places her analysand in front of a mirror (the original point of recognition of the self) in a dressing room of an upscale Beverly Hills department store. Positioned behind Naomi, just as Freud would have been sitting behind Dora, London photographs her as she looks at herself in the mirror. As Naomi watches herself, London in turn observes and records the emergence of Naomi’s many inner selves: Naomi as debutante in the ball gown; Naomi as Prada wearing bookworm; or Naomi as vixen in a tight leopard print dress. Are these different personae, about true identity, masquerade, or projection? Perhaps they are an accurate reflection of all the multiple “true” selves found in every subject. Caught in this hypnotic web of gazes one could forever ponder these photographs like the girls in their images endlessly examine themselves. For Laura London’s images of Naomi and others not only reflect the ambiguities and contradictions contained within today’s youth they also mirror some of the most intriguing work created in current photography, -Sarah Gavlak
Laurence A. Rickels Laura London is an explorer of the Teen Age, you know the age, like, you know, I don’t know, the one we live in. The teen in our midst, the inner teen, is the measure and metabolism of what’s most pressing right now on the edge of the time to come. That’s why boredom is one bottom line only the teen can hang with: in less represented terms, what we call boredom is the wide open space of incalculable events, adverts, adventures. It’s the ever new frontier in which we get an outside chance of encountering the other, the one who comes towards us, uncontrollably, unstoppably, like the future, like reality. It’s in such a moment that identification exceeds itself and opens up to intervention, self invention, the advent of the other in your face. Like one moment I'm bored, then next moment I’m dressing up fit to be tied to a star. Rock Star Moment double features the dress-up rituals of a 13-year-old imitating the likes of Shirley Manson, Marilyn Manson, and Courtney Love. But each moment is about London’s relationship to her subject. She’s there, two. She pays tribute to the agency or identity teens construct for themselves in the course of identifying with the stars, models, idols in our current saturation sensurround of total information. The resulting look is not the placeholder for the original nor can it be reduced to the teen’s desire to be like figures recognized for being different. It is something new and passing that hangs around for a while in London’s photographs. In this work the photographer-director is a participant, a teenager at heart. London tries to capture the often overlooked aspects of teen likability. Even while becoming or making image, the teen resists objectification by attaining the crazy careful imperfection of a look at once received and reclaimed. Focus on the difference made in current teen identification rituals is one goal of London’s attention to the kind of body of work that can be built by doing the stats and working the specs of a perspective at once sociological and psychological. Psychoanalytically, however, it is the same difference that comes into focus. The girl who dresses up as rock stars is also playing princess in fantasies that take off from and take her way from her present family role. The favorite period costume for the Barbie doll is still that of medieval princess. London is one of those names that’s a place name, the name of one place in particular that has absorbed histories, even or especially histories of the recent past. Since the 1960s. London has been a center stage of the Teen Age. But beneath the mini-skirting of this youth culture’s origin in the in-group’s murder of the primal Pop. London’s Teen Age was first to show the stretch lines of tension binding this age to the Middle Ages, both as historical or fantastic past and as a phase in human development, that is, the time of crisis in which midlifers value the youth that was wasted on them back then. Teen energy is unthinkable with out the fantasy resources of the Middle Ages crisis. The middle ages serve the time in which teens, too, imagine a fantasy past, crowded with props from the Middle Ages, to which they assign their parents, thus at once declaring them history (“so medieval!”) and granting them a heroic version of their own adolescence (which, on its own, by the way, wastes away). Fantasy, before it became a best-selling literary genre, was analyzed by Freud, in his essay on The Poet and Day-Dreaming, in terms of the two times you get and the one time you forget. Freud’s example features a boy in his early teens, an orphan, who decides to apply for a job he has just heard about. On the way to his interview he fantasizes getting the job, rising up the ranks of employment, until he is second in command to his boss, whose daughter he marries and whose business he inherits. The past tense belongs to a time when the boy was the beloved young child of his parents. His yearning for that past animates the fantasy, which belongs to the future. It’s a fiction about the time to come that is at the same time inspired by the past that saw him better off, beloved, protected. But for the fantasy to unfold the day-dreamer must precisely forget the present, his job search, his unemployed, alone-in-the-world-status--he must forget the present tension that the fantasy circumvents on the past-to-future bridge. This London bridge isn’t falling down, not in Star Wars, not in Rock Star Moment. Ever since the invention of mid life, which coincides with the invention of adolescence, even crisis is on one hot line to and through Middle Ages and Teen Age fantasies. |
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