12 Apr 2012

Roberts & Tilton presents Farrah Karapetian

Farrah Karapetian
Representation³
Co-Organized by Justin Gilanyi
April 14 - May 26, 2012
Opening Reception Saturday, April 14th, 6 to 8pm

At times, overwhelming circumstances place the human character at the heart of a tragi-comic narrative; these circumstances fascinate artist Farrah Karapetian, as do the photographic circumstances through which they are represented in the media. Each piece in this exhibition is inspired by a specific image culled from the news over the course of 2011; the original representation is then restaged according to the artist's process of constructing negatives or re-enactments; finally, these sculptural negatives and darkroom performances result in unique photograms, a third stage of representation. Each piece in the show prompts us to consider how diverse representational strategies - pictorial, sculptural, performative, photographic - foster different states of address in a viewing citizen. 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. Karapetian's strategies of re-representation consider the availability of a deeper, slower experience of both the photograph and its content than is afforded by the fleeting jpeg disseminated online.

Farrah Karapetian (b. U.S. 1978) received a BA in fine art from Yale University in 2000 and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2008. Karapetian has been a MacDowell Fellow (2010) and an artist-in-residence at the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War (2009) and has exhibited at The Centre d'Art Contemporain in Parc Saint-Léger, France; Superfront, Brooklyn; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Artist Gallery.

Panel Discussion: Close Encounters of a Material Kind
Saturday, April 21st, 2012, 4pm
Panelists: Katie Grinnan, Farrah Karapetian, Sohrab Mohebbi, and Alexandro Segade

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