“Portraiture has always been motivated by two competing and overlapping desires: the desire to record, and the desire to be recorded. Artists Katy Grannan and Charlie White have examined this tension, exploring concepts of identity and subjectivity in a world increasingly dominated by media representations of the ideal self. The Sun and Other Stars presents two bodies of work that map the fragility and resilience of individuality in contemporary Western culture.

Grannan’s unflinching portraits capture adult subjects along the sun-struck boulevards of the American West, transforming them from obscurity to individuality with pathos and candor. White’s series of blonde teenage girls frames the popular and tyrannical appetite for celebrity with a deadpan lack of sentimentality. These two photographic series, accompanied by Grannan’s first film project and White’s new animation and personal collections of mass-culture ephemera, provide a visual vocabulary for an examination of the human subject and the encumbering effect of desire and aspiration.”

— Britt Salvesen, The Sun and Other Stars: Katy Grannan and Charlie White