Collaboration with Charlie White and design of poster/take away for the exhibition Spilling Hot Gossip a selection from The Girl Studies at Oslo Kunstforening.

“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

Creatures of Comfort New York is pleased to present No More Reality, a temporary bookshop and exhibition organized by Textfield, Inc. The bookshop and exhibition will take place in Creatures of Comfort’s adjacent project space at 205 Mulberry St.

In conjunction with the bookshop, which will feature current and archived titles from Textfield Distribution, there will be an exhibition of work by artists that Jonathan Maghen has collaborated with through Textfield to realize various publishing projects. The exhibition will feature the works of Phil Chang, Arthur Ou, Eduardo Sarabia, and Anna Sew Hoy.

The bookshop and exhibition title have been appropriated from the Philippe Parreno work, No More Reality (the demonstration), 1991, which is a four-minute video of children demonstrating, and chanting the slogan and title (“No More Reality”).

New York Times Tmagazine.

Words Without Pictures was originally conceived by curator Charlotte Cotton and artist Alex Klein as a means of creating spaces for discourse around current issues in photography. Every month for a year, beginning in November 2007, an artist, educator, critic or curator was invited to contribute a short unillustrated essay about an aspect of emerging photography. Each piece was available on the Words Without Pictures website for one month and was accompanied by a discussion forum focused on its specific topic. Over the course of its month-long “life,” each essay received both invited and unsolicited responses from a wide range of interested parties. All of these essays, responses and other provocations are gathered together here. Previously issued as a print-on-demand title, we are pleased to present Words Without Pictures to the trade for the first time as part of the Aperture Ideas series.

By now, every bona fide Blackberry or iPhone owner probably knows that the abbreviations OMG, BFF, and LOL stand for “oh my God,” “best friends forever,” and “laughing out loud” in the world of Short Message Service (SMS), which has come to be known as texting.

Based on a two-year study of the behavior of an actual American teenage girl, the animation is part of a larger project called The Girl Studies that dissects the desires and social anxieties of our era. The animation is meant to perform as a viable cartoon for young girls, while simultaneously providing a platform from which viewers can critique them. White’s works in photography, film, and more recently animation, often offer fictitious narratives to help us understand and evaluate the underlying realities of contemporary life.

This particular project features Tara and Blakey, two American-girl cartoon characters with pink-glitter accessories, trendy clothing, and commercial desires. These archetypes of the American teen are used to examine their representation from different angles. Set in three looping scenes, OMG BFF LOL contains the cartoon’s capitalist manifesto, “having is so much better than wanting,” discussed by the girls in a crystal shopping mall scene. The second and third scenes, set in a bedroom and bathroom, open the door to the interior loneliness and isolation of the two main characters, as viewers observe them surfing TV channels and radio stations, snacking, posing in front of a full length mirror, and crying, as a digital clock marks the passage of time.

White wrote and directed OMG BFF LOL, working in collaboration with Chuck Gammage studios, a Canadian animation house, to create the intentionally dated quality of the scenes. He explains, “The three segments loop on a now obsolete 4:3 Sony Trinitron monitor, which conjures the television as both box and broadcast mechanism.”

—Mónica Ramírez-Montagut

* A free download (MP3) of the teen-dance remix of We Love to Shop is available here.

Excerpt from Charlie White’s cartoon OMG BFF LOL (Mall) from his project The Girl Studies, 2008. (Run Time: 3 min., 16 sec.)

Catalog;
Keith Bormuth,
Christian Cummings,
Michael Hayden,
Lee Lynch,
Emily Mast,
Nicole Miller,
Dianna Molzan,
Michael Parker

organized by Jonathan Maghen

2009 MFA Catalog made possible through the generous support of:
Hunk and Moo Anderson, The Harry W. and Mary M. Anderson Charitable Foundation,
Richard and Lynnie Dewey, Putter Pence, Anne Cohen

Collaboration with Charlie White and design of poster/take away for the exhibition Spilling Hot Gossip a selection from The Girl Studies at Oslo Kunstforening.