Charlie White: American Minor
Published by JRP
Book Signing
Saturday, April 18, 2009, 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Aiming for the jugular of the American unconscious, the photographs of Los Angeles-based artist Charlie White inspect the culture's fictions through staged artifice, reminiscent of, say, Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson. American Minor delves into an important and ongoing theme in White's work—the American teen, and all that goes into its manufacture.
Having approached this theme with an earlier project whose protagonist was a hairy, fragile doll named Joshua, here White tackles the taboos of nascent sexuality in the American teen girl—both the vulnerability of that sexuality as a topic and the ruthlessness with which it is exploited when it goes unexamined. Cataloging studio archives, film stills, animation stills, and scripts, and using images culled from White's two-year study of one teenager, archives of magazine covers featuring iconic blonde models, stills from his first 35mm film and his photographic comparative study of teens and transgendered people, American Minor presents White's ongoing and never-before-seen studies of the American teen subject as both image and idea. American Minor is a bold excavation of the sociosexual forces that surround us all.
Based in Los Angeles, White is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California Roski School of Fine Arts, where he is also director of the MFA program.
White’s work has been exhibited internationally in museums such as the Center of Contemporary Art of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain; ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, Germany; Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, China; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Oberösterreichisches Landesumuseum, Linz, Austria; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Australia; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; and ICA Philadelphia, PA. Most recently White was included in Art in America NOW, organized by the Guggenheim and presented at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. White’s work was included in "The Puppet Show" at the ICA Philadelphia and "The Old Weird America" at Houston Contemporary Art Museum, and is included in "Nine Lives: Visionary Artists in Los Angeles," curated by Ali Subotnik, now on view at the Hammer Museum in March 2009.
American Minor was edited by Christoph Doswald and Dorothea Strauss and published by JRP/Ringier. The publication is hardcover and 144 pages with 80 color images. It retails for $65 and can be purchased at Printed Matter’s storefront or at www.printedmatter.org. The first 50 books purchased through Printed Matter will come with a limited edition signed poster by the artist.
For more information, please contact AA Bronson@printedmatter.org.
Printed Matter, Inc. has received support, in part, through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Altria Group Inc, the Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, The Gesso Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Schoenstadt Family Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and individuals worldwide.