SIRI KAUR – THIS KIND OF FACE
2014-12-08The works on view are selected from an ongoing series Kaur started in 2006 to capture impersonators who spend much of their daily life as costumed celebrity look-alikes. Kaur initially set out to photograph the moment when the subject of a photograph lets down their guard and cracks appear in the everyday performance of the idea of self. Impersonators offer an exaggerated instance of this schism, representing conflict on the surface of their bodies in the uncomfortable conflation of their everyday existence with the aggrandized construction they attempt to embody. We see the impersonator in an ordinary, natural habitat: Cyndi Lauper on a motel mattress, Abe Lincoln in a Southern California backyard.
As we look closely at the subjects of Kaur’s photographs we see people who are not quite living out fantasies of being the rich and famous. Rather, they are look-alikes in the business of being a doppelganger, providing a tangible vessel for the audience’s already media-saturated imagination. Like her subjects, who fashion themselves after specific glamorized Hollywood and media constructions, Kaur found herself over the course of the project impersonating the production of celebrity photographers such as Richard Avedon and Bruce Weber. The formal structures of her photographs morphed as she expanded the scope of her practice. She imitated Hollywood industry headshots and US Weekly paparazzo pictures, and created her own 4×5 photographic versions of Warhol’s Marilyns and dictators. In other images, mundane moments reveal themselves, rendered both poignant and uncanny by Kaur’s formal eye: Superman talking on the telephone, Saddam Hussein cracking a smile, Marilyn Monroe shyly crossing her hands together. Together the pictures in This Kind of Face function as playful hybridic references to the multiplicity of possibilities existing within the expansive field of photographic portraiture.
Opposite – Siri Kaur, Marilyn (Wink), 2014
Exhibition runs through till December 23rd, 2014
Cohen Gallery
7354 Beverly Boulevard
Los Angeles
CA 90036
