Leigh Ledare

 

Year: 2012
Medium: Digital Chromogenic Print
Edition: 1/5
Value: $3800

Minimum bid: $1500

 

Image courtesy of Leigh Ledare.

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Leigh Ledare (born 1976) is an artist living and working in New York. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 2008. His work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including Leigh Ledare, et al. (Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen, 2013, and WIELS Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels, 2012); An Invitation (Pilar Corrias, London), Leigh Ledare (The Box, Los Angeles, 2012); You Are Nothing to Me, You Are Like Air (Rivington Arms, NY), and Pretend You’re Actually Alive (Andrew Roth Gallery, New York, all 2008), as well as in group exhibitions, including How Soon is Now? (The Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture, Moscow); Greater New York (P.S.1/MoMA, New York, all, 2010); and Ca Me Touche (Les Rencontres d’Arles, Arles. He has taught at California Institute of the Arts, Columbia University, New York University. 

 

Pretend You’re Actually Alive documents his mother’s complex presentation of self, and provides a key for understanding much of his broader practice, in which transgression is, also, a cipher for a larger reflection on the workings of photography itself: how it mediates identity, relationships, love, loss, and, perhaps above all, human vulnerability. At the age of 50, already having begun to cultivate an extremely sexualized persona, Ledare's mother approached him to document her for posterity. The project articulates itself alongside, and against, this complicity imposed upon Ledare. A precocious youth as a professional ballerina; a loving mother; a pornographic actress; an aging beauty; the victim of a car accident; a daughter. These are all roles his mother shifted effortlessly between while responding to the demands of external and internal realities. Through photography, video, archived ephemera, and text—all of which are used to destabilize clear cut notions of agency—Ledare's work explores these psychic fractures of modern identity, as a direct resistance to mainstream culture’s mythical depiction of a centered, unitary self.

 

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