Charlie White

Los Angeles artist Charlie White doesn't take photographs. He constructs them. Like a Hollywood director, he orchestrates scenes, commissions sets, hires actors, and employs a visual effects team. Then he oversees a grueling postproduction process in which each element of the shoot is digitized, scrutinized, and perfected down to the pixel. In essence, he captures an entire film in one frame. In many of these scenes the subject matter has been that of Hollywood´s - and White´s- obsession with fantasy and destruction - destructions usually wrought by monsters and aliens, incarnated through skillfull special effects.

Everything is American is his new photographic series which re-creates and re-imagines iconic moments from history and myth to construct a revised history of human violence. However the violence of Everything is American is generally implicit and brought by the viewer rather than underlined by the artist. For example in a work titled Jody, the titular girl has a small scratch on her face, but it is the viewer who imagines what caused it.

From the gaze of a young Susan Atkins standing trial for the Tate-La Bianca murders, to the martyr-like pathos of an injured United States gymnast, the portraits in White's Everything is American -series create an arresting tension between the fictional and the recognisable. In these photographs no image is truly innocent; even at their most anonymous and lyrical, each subject in the series bears the overtones of a narrative that is inescapably American. In work titled The Americans; US Gymnast Team, the focal point of the image is a young girl held by the coach - as if in Pieta - clutching her ankle and flanked by two young rivals who appear to be taking pleasure in her injury. It is typical to White´s images to simultaneously play at multiple levels and the violent subtext in Everything is American -series for example runs into a territory of unknown anxieties. His work is equally rich in references from the work of great painters. For example in Champion, a Napoleon Dynamite-esque youth dangles a vast humanoid head from his hand as a trophy, as a mere reference to Caravaggio.

Pressetext

Charlie White
Everything is American