FARRAH KARAPETIAN – REPRESENTATION3
2012-04-09The images Karapetian mines reflect moments in our lived history at which overwhelming circumstances place the human character at the heart of a tragi-comic narrative. In the elaborate staging and exhibition of these prints, the artist returns to the position of the photograph as an a-factual object: color, markmaking, and time spent are revealed as the products of both choice and chance here, and the print itself is what one sees first, rather than its subject. The time it takes to expose each print – sometimes doubly or triply – is registered in the image, pushing the work into the conceptual place occupied by motion pictures.
Representation implies and includes abstraction: Karapetian’s work, though largely figurative, includes hints as to the codes of its own making and to the ideological codes of the mass-media as well. The pictures reveal iconic representational tendencies in contemporary photography and graphic design, which are employed to describe events with extra-experiential drama and clarity. By working with hyperanalogue processes and at the scale of everyday life, the artist shows us that re-representation offers the possibility of deeper, slower experience of potent moments in our lived history than is afforded by the fleeting jpeg disseminated online.
Opposite – Riot Police, 2011
Exhibition runs through to May 26th, 2012
Roberts & Tilton
5801 Washington Boulevard
Culver City
Los Angeles
CA
90232
