Isaac Julien
True North
15 July - 23 October 2005
Reception Friday July 15, 7-9pm
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture
at the Schindler House
835 North Kings Road
West Hollywood, California 90069
T.323.651.1510
Curated by Lauri Firstenberg
Isaac Julien, True North series (Untitled), 2004, color photograph, 100x100cm, Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Metro Pictures, New York.
Marking the first solo exhibition of British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien in Los Angeles, True North debuts Juliens new corpus of photographs featuring lush detailed formal stills from his film shoot in Iceland this year. A lone figure cloaked in dark wool and fur navigates this sublime white landscape. The ice is transparent the scenery is blue. The irreconcilable site of ice and ocean is hyper-realized through Juliens lens. Through his signature high formalism and uncanny framing, Julien transforms this found environment into a field of fantasy.
The True North project reanimates heroic polar explorations through the lens of mythology and fiction, rooted in a distinctly imperialist history, evoking ethnographic precursors such as Nanook of the North. Working through the legacies and problematics of the documentary tradition, Julien negotiates the romanticism and alleged realism within the documentary lexicon, as it speaks to the construction of identity in the visual field. In keeping with his larger practice, the True North project continues Juliens poetic and political explorations of space and subjectivity, of historical memory and contemporary experience.
Related Events:
Saturday July 16
Panel Discussion at the Schindler House 6pm with Isaac Julien, Lisa Bloom, Jose Munoz, Michael Wang, Steven Nelson, Simon Leung, Malik Gaines and Lauri Firstenberg.
Billboard Project on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Olive Drive (one block east of La Cienega) in collaboration with Viacom Outdoor and the City of West Hollywoods Arts on the Outside Initiative.
Isaac Julien: True North is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Peter Norton Family Foundation, and the City of West Hollywoods Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission.
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House
835 North Kings Road
West Hollywood, California 90069
T.323.651.1510 www.makcenter.org
