Giovanna Pennacchi is delighted to present the exhibition
LOS ANGELES BOULEVARDS – Photographs by Stephen Hilger
Allan Frame, curator
Acta International
Dal 23 Maggio al 12 Giugno
Inaugurazione alla presenza dell’artista
giovedì 23 Maggio – ore 19,00
My first time in Los Angeles I rode into town in the back of my parents’ station wagon. It was 1958. Touring the West on a family vacation, we had left Las Vegas at dusk, driven through the desert, and arrived in Beverly Hills late at night with a movie star map, spotting the homes of Doris Day, James Stewart, Jack Benny, and then, Fred Astaire. There he was in person, in his garage, getting into his car with a date, then backing out into the street. He rolled down his window, and hailed my father, who had slowed down to gawk. “Are you lost?” he asked. My father grabbed me and pulled me to the window. “No, we’re not lost, but this is my son. He loves your movies!” Growing up in Missisippi, I was star-struck, enthralled with Hollywood, and much later, captivated by the literature of LA, the noirish novels of James Cain, Horace McCoy, Raymond Chandler, and Nathaniel West that depicted the seedy collapse of the American dream at the Pacific’s edge.
Stephen Hilger, a Brooklyn-based photographer, is a native of Los Angeles, for whom the typical myths of Hollywood glamour and film-noir intrigue have been peeled away to reveal a plain, nondescript place, sometimes lush, and a little run-down, its hints of commuter tedium and income disparity softened by radiant sunlight and bursts of color in unexpected places. Absent are any celebrities or tourists.
The few figures who appear are laborers, and a homeless man wrapped in something that looks like a body bag, sleeping on a bench that advertises a medical provider. In making this work, Hilger drives “the largest and longest streets from one part of the city to another, stopping along the way to observe the ever-unfolding spectacle that is daily life.” His aim, he says, is “to reveal elements of the complex character of the city of Los Angeles, at once magnificently beautiful and melancholic, anachronistic and mutable.”
Like William Eggleston, Hilger finds the gospel in the random everyday. Color is an integral part of his work, whether it’s the splotch of blue paint on the white sidewall of a cottage, remnants of confetti found in a gutter, the blue of an obsolete telephone booth, or the green of an old newspaper box rhyming with a coral stripe on the curb. With a sense of humor, he depicts vernacular handmade signs, such as the one in front of a mom and pop drug store that promotes “intestinal cleansers” and “cardiovascular support.” For Hilger, the overriding concern is to “illuminate the unseen and unknown moments that dent the Los Angeles metropolis in full.” This is street photography in a place with empty sidewalks and endless boulevards. With an eye for detail and demographics, he manages to make the desolate feel specific, even familiar. Hilger is a photographer whose work traces historical memory in the social landscape. His most recent work, Los Angeles Boulevards, constructs an archive of visual motifs at the intersection of public and private spaces throughout Los Angeles.
By Allen Frame
BIOS
Stephen Hilger has exhibited at venues including Los Angeles Contemporary Art Exhibitions; Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles; the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans; and Transmitter, Brooklyn. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Hilger is the author of the monograph Back of Town (SPQR Editions, 2016), the limited-edition publication BLVD (ROMAN NVMERALS, 2017), and his photographs have appeared in periodicals including New York Magazine and the New York Times. His writing about photography and contemporary art has appeared in Aperture’s PhotoBook Review and BOMB. Hilger received his B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from Columbia University and was a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. He currently teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he is an Associate Professor in the Photography Department and he is also the Director of Education at the Gordon Parks Foundation.
Hilger was a Pratt Institute School of Art Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome during October 2018. This is his first exhibition in Italy.
Allen Frame is based in New York and represented by Gitterman Gallery in New York where his next solo exhibition will be in June, 2019. He is a winner of the 2017/2018 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and recent work he made while in Rome was presented in the exhibition Innamorato at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in 2018. His 2013 exhibition Dialogue with Bolaño was presented at the Museum of Art of the Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, in 2014. His work has been included extensively in group shows since 1976. Detour, a compilation of his photographs over a decade, was published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2001.
He has been the curator of numerous exhibitions, including Darrel Ellis at Art in General, in 1996, and In This Place at Art in General in 2004. In Rome, in 2018, he curated two photo exhibitions at ACTA International, Illusione Persistente and Fuggenti Figure. He is an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Pratt Institute (MFA) and also teaches at the School of Visual Arts (BFA), and the International Center of Photography in New York. He graduated from Harvard University and grew up in Mississippi.
ACTA INTERNATIONAL
Direzione: Giovanna Pennacchi
dal martedì al sabato, ore 16 – 19,30
via Panisperna, 82/83
00184 Roma
tel 064742005