LAUREL NAKADATE - Fever Dreams at the Crystal Motel    May 7 - Jul 24, 2009

May 7 through July 24

Laurel Nakadate is known for powerful video and photographic works in which the artist, her subjects, and the viewer are entangled in an unsettling dance of seduction, power, trust, tenderness, loss, and betrayal. The darkly hallucinatory discomfort of fever dreams permeates her newest videos and photographs.

The exhibition, our first presentation of works by the artist, features a new series of short videos projected or displayed on a monitor. In these works, ritualized exorcisms are performed by Nakadate and her cast of amateur actors. Locations shift from dingy, claustrophobic motel rooms to the majestic open spaces of the American West. There are ecstatic dances, woodland walks, train travels, and reluctant stripteases. Unwanted feelings and bad memories are cast away.

The show also includes two groups of photographs: the Fever Dreams series, large images that Nakadate shot while making her videos; and the Lucky Tiger series, small snapshots in which she appears in suggestive poses inspired by 1950s-style cheesecake and camera-club photos. These snapshots were completed during a “performance” in which the artist and anonymous middleaged men, enlisted via Craigslist.com, covered their hands with fingerprinting ink and touched the photographs together. Sitting in a circle, on the floor of one man’s living room, they passed the snapshots around, like trading cards.

Since Nakadate developed her mature aesthetic as a Yale MFA candidate almost a decade ago, her works have been characterized by psychological complexity and formal beauty. Often the sole protagonist in both her still and moving images, she shoots everything herself using a variety of cameras. This dual relationship to the camera and its fixed single viewpoint as well as her ongoing interest in clichés and the banal can be seen as a forerunner to YouTube where everything is equal and anyone can be a star.

Laurel Nakadate was born in Austin, Texas, in 1975 and raised in Ames, Iowa. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University in 1998 and completed her MFA at Yale University in 2001.

She has participated in eight solo exhibitions and in group shows at galleries and museums throughout the world, including the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid; the Berkeley Art Museum; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; the Asia Society, New York; and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; among other institutions. Her first feature-length film, Stay the Same Never Change, premiered in January of this year at the Sundance Film Festival and was recently featured in New Directors/New Films at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center.

The gallery is located at 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, on the sixth floor. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. Summer hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm, July 7th through 24th.