Stills: Emerging Photography in the 1990s November 28, 1997-March 8, 1999

Photography has undergone many transformations since the 1960s. Among the most important of these changes was the movement away from modernism's concern with refined, formal beauty toward a conceptual impulse that treated photography as a means to illustrate an idea. In the 1990s, a new generation of artists has emerged that is deeply indebted to conceptual artists of the past three decades, such as Ed Ruscha, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Sherrie Levine, who freed the medium of photography to become one tool among many in the artist's repertoire. Stills: Emerging Photography in the 1990s unites an international group of young artists who advance this conceptual legacy in their photographic practice. Drawing upon our culture's fascination with film and filmmaking, each of the artists in this exhibition explores a Hollywood back-lot mentality either through the filmlike mise-en-scène of their constructed or found "sets" or by treating their photographs as films and directing their subjects as actors. While Thomas Demand (Berlin) photographs his own cardboard sets that reconstruct significant yet eerily anonymous photographs from the media, Julie Becker and Miles Coolidge (both Los Angeles) find their sets in the everyday world. Jeff Burton's (Los Angeles) photographs come straight from the heart of Hollywood, haunting the periphery of actual low-budget film sets. Sharon Lockhart (Los Angeles), Sam Taylor-Wood (London), and Anna Gaskell (New York) each take on a directorial role in their photographs, transforming their subjects into actors. In Lockhart's photographic screen tests, Gaskell's recreations of scenes from Alice in Wonderland, and Taylor-Wood's epic dissection of theatrical emotion in her 25-foot-long photographic installation Five Revolutionary Seconds I (1995), a disconnection occurs between the banality of everyday life and the dramatic pathos of narrative. In the work of each of these artists, beauty and form mingle with concept and narrative to produce a provocative blurring of the artificial and the real. Curator: Douglas Fogle, Walker Art Center