Ami
Barak

Americans in New York 2 / Sharon Hayes, Leigh Ledare, LaToya Ruby Frazier

Galerie Michel Rein, Paris January-February 2012

Four years after a first exhibition under the same title, and in the same walls, here is the time of a repeat encore. But the same title does not necessarily mean similar exhibition, or even a "second season". The pretext remains the same, but the twinship stops there.

New York, the essential capital of contemporary art, always offers a reinvigorated and revitalized scene. In this sprawling metropolis where artists flock from all sides, one thing is clear: the forces of globalization also present in the field of art paradoxically leaves a rather broad path to cultural horizons that strive to escape. New York is not America said, but America needs New York to exist globally, this is what this small exhibition will try to demonstrate in the form of some slices of news with a strong relent identity. The three invited artists use the photographic image to tell, in turn, the tense link between the private and the public, between personal narrative and collective history, between politics as private struggle and commitment par excellence and the way in which it rubs off on the place of the city.

About the artists

Sharon Hayes (born 1970 in Baltimore, Maryland, lives and works in New York)
In her performances, videos and installations, New York artist Sharon Hayes examines the intersection between history, politics, speeches and events. By staging anachronistic or speculative demonstrations and delivering a speech inspired by the language of politics and theatrical dramaturgy in front of strangers, the artist creates interventions that highlight the tension between collective and personal, fiction and fact historical.

Leigh Ledare (born 1976 in Seattle, lives and works in New York)
Leigh Ledare uses photography, archives, text and social taboos to question human subjectivity, desire and the photographic image at the same time. He delivers a disturbingly honest testimony about the psychological and photographic exploration of his unique and yet subversive relationship with his mother, and thus questions the expected limits, exploding the frames of a traditional family structure and emerge from an atypical relationship. and out of the ordinary.

LaToya Ruby Frazier (born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, lives and works in New Brunswick, New Jersey and New York)
LaToya Ruby Frazier explores the psychological and intergenerational relationships of her family through photographs and videos where the boundaries between self-portrait and social documentary disappear. Taken in his hometown (Braddock, Pennsylvania) the artist's images capture in parallel the effects of the dramatic decline of the old steel mills. Through a specific objective, his work questions the role of family dynamics both personally and in society at large.