January 16, 1997

SDSU art exhibition challenges traditional notions of portraiture

CONTACT: Rosemary Gladden, 594-2585

"Composite Persona" includes the works of 14 artists who use traditional and technological media to portray individuals from various ethnic groups, economic stratas and alternative lifestyles who are not often seen in historical portraiture.

The exhibition opens at SDSU's University Art Gallery with a reception for the artists on Friday, February 7 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The exhibition continues through March 15. San Diego artist James Luna will present a performative lecture in conjunction with the exhibition on Thursday, February 20 at 7 p.m. in room 412 of the School of Art, Design and Art History. The exhibition will then travel to the Fullerton Museum Center in Fullerton, Calif.

Artists represented are Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig; Dawoud Bey; Lordan Bunch; Nancy Burson; Clegg & Guttmann; Keith Cottingham; Guillermo Gómez-Peña; Lyle Ashton Harris; Susan Hauptman; Gavin Lee; Jin Lee; Scott Lifshutz; Lorraine O'Grady; and Catherine Opie.

Composite Persona is co-organized by Tina Yapelli, director of the University Art Gallery at SDSU, and Lynn La Bate, curator at the Fullerton Museum Center. The San Diego presentation of the exhibition is sponsored by the School of Art, Design and Art History; the College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts; and the fund for Instructionally Related Activities. Additional support is provided by the San Diego State University Art Council. The presentation at the Fullerton Museum Center is a public/private partnership sponsored by the Community Services Department of the City of Fullerton and the Fullerton Museum Center Association.

SDSU's University Art Gallery is open from noon to 4 p.m., Monday through Thursday and Saturday. The reception for the artists, the performative lecture and the exhibition are FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Parking permits are available at the Gallery for use in Lot 160. No permit is required for events (use lots 160, 400, Student and Faculty/Staff). For information about the exhibition, call 594-4941 or 594-5171.

The exhibition

Before the advent of photography in the 1830s, portraiture was reserved for the elite. The traditional painted portrait reflected the aristocratic patron not only in appearance, but in status as well. After photography made portraiture accessible to middle-class individuals, commercial studios continued to use settings and props that evoked the sophisticated aura of commissioned portraiture. In Composite Persona, the artists express resistance towards the conventions of portraiture by representing subjects who might otherwise be held on the fringes of society.

In photographs by Dawoud Bey, teenagers from various racial backgrounds resolutely return the viewer's gaze. In each work, two or more photographs combine to create an image, suggesting the fragmentation and complexity of contemporary life.

Influenced by 17th-century old-master paintings, Catherine Opie portrays transvestites, transexuals and others who transgress gender categories. She portrays them as individual human beings -- in fact, as friends.

Invented or fantasy portraits are seen in the works by Lyle Ashton Harris, Clegg & Guttmann and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Ashton Harris's theatrical photographs present a masquerade where gender roles and race are flexible and interchangeable. Clegg & Guttmann present high-gloss color pictures based on corporate photography. Gómez-Peña conducted a survey on the Internet to elicit respondents' notions of people from Mexico. Using these comments, Gómez-Peña and his collaborators dressed in costumes that incorporated stereotypical props and clothing associated with the Mexican national identity.

In addition to its benevolent function of portraiture, early photography was a prime means of recording and categorizing information about the "other." Criminals, the unemployed, the mentally and physically ill, and ethnographic "types" were subjected to the camera's lens. Several of the photographic and photographically-inspired portraits in this exhibition refer to the original documentary function of photography. However, instead of recording deviance, the

portraits sanction diversity. Jin Lee, for example, does not depict her silhouetted profiles of

people from various ethnic backgrounds as specimen "types," but as beautiful forms whose personalities cannot be determined from visible ethnic markers.

Photography is also the inspiration for painters who evoke the power of the photograph to manipulate viewers to believe what they see. Evoking the eerie sensation of stopped time, paintings by Lordan Bunch explore the suspended moment between life and its representation. Scott Lifshutz paints only the faces of his subjects -- an ethnic cross-section of society represented by the artist's friends. Susan Hauptman creates photo-realistic charcoal self-portraits in various roles.

The composite portrait can also be achieved through the physical conjoining of images. Lorraine O'Grady's "Sisters" series draws on the link between the mixed cultural heritages of ancient Egypt and contemporary African American society. In this series, O'Grady pairs illustrations of ancient Egyptian sculptures with portraits of women in her family who bear a striking resemblance to the sculpted figures. The collaborative team of Gwen Akin & Allan Ludwig explore gender roles through pairings of photographs of men and women. Their diptychs suggest imaginary narratives based on the juxtaposition of disparate images.

New technologies have allowed the portrait to enter the computer age. Nancy Burson creates composite photographs through a computerized program that digitally manipulates and combines images into a single composite representation. This technique is based on 19th century documentary photography. Francis Galton, a French statistician made compilation studies of human groups by layering photographic negatives to obtain collective representations. Categories of "consumptive," "ethnic," and "criminal" served to identify deviant typologies by common physical characteristics. In a conversely positive application of composite methods, Burson has helped identify and locate missing children years after their disappearance by digitally aging their images. Gavin Lee also uses the computer as a tool for collaging images. Overlaying pictures, historical documents and letters, Lee works in an archaeological manner to

reconstruct events from his ancestral past to convey an ongoing narrative of his family's immigration from China to the United States. Keith Cottingham uses low-tech computer programs to create fictitious portraits by compiling digitally-scanned anatomical drawings, modeled clay and photographic fragments of body parts of various individuals to produce a single "portrait."

(end)