François Ghebaly Gallery
510 Bernard St
323.221.2300
This event has passed.
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Marie Jager at Ghebaly Gallery
- When
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Opens Saturday May 1, 2010 (5–9pm)
May 1, 2010 – June 19, 2010
Wednesdays–Sundays (noon–6pm)
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- Price
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François Ghebaly says: The exhibition will include paintings, prints and works on paper. In her Pollution Painting series, Marie Jager makes visible the invisible combustion and sediment that defines the city's landscape. Playing off LA's varied reputation for car culture, inevitable sunshine, and smog-induced sunsets, Jager placed canvases in the outdoors and retrieved them a month later as readymade landscape paintings. The delicate abstractions that result invert the en plein air of one of painting's longstanding conventional modes. In contrast to these durational portraits of the urban environment, the instant of ignition that defines everyday life in Los Angeles—turning over the engine in your car—is captured repeatedly in Jager's Starter paintings where the burnt oil discharged when the motor engages makes an instant oil-on-canvas landscape of the city's mobility and automobile reliant citizenry.
Marie Jager's works from the Heat series (2009) are blueprinted aerial views of the city of Los Angeles, which through various masking techniques, she has partially exposed to the sun's damaging rays during heat waves. Blueprinting is a process similar to the cyanotype process invented by British astronomer John Herschel. By Jager's intervention, she pushes the photosensitivity further, and offering the prints to the long exposure of the city's elements, she pushes them to a point of discoloration that evokes the blinding effect of the sun. While the Heat series result in a halo of light entering the picture, the series titled Rain turns aerial views of the city into giant watercolors, recording various patterns of rain and resulting in different levels of abstraction.
