A Study in Portraiture: Act II

The enthusiasm of the London curators, artists, dealers, and patrons is not to be under-estimated and we thank everyone who supported the first international portion of this project!

View all of the behind-the-scenes photographs and selected portraits on the Flickr page for A Study in Portraiture.

Heather Cantrell – A Study in Portraiture: Act II
Curated by Caryn Coleman

25 November – 19 December, 2009
Private view: Friday, 27 November from 6:30-9pm

MOTInternational: 54 Regents Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 4QN / info@motinternational.org / +44 (0)20 7923 9561

From John Baldessari to David Yow, Heather Cantrell has always looked within her own tribe of artists, curators, and musicians in her exploration of community and subcultures. Now, she looks to the London art scene with A Study in Portraiture: Act II as part of her ongoing international ethnographic study that simultaneously documents, subverts, and reveals identities of the art world through performative portraiture. Having debuted in Los Angeles this summer, MOT International plays host to ‘Act II’ in this ongoing series, transforming the gallery into an ‘in-house’ photography for the duration of the exhibition.

Members of the London art community are being invited to participate by having their portrait taken during performative sessions, or happenings, that punctuate the exhibition. Using hand-painted backdrops with a variety of costume and prop materials, Cantrell embraces the ‘theater of the portrait’ and pushes her role as an artist/director by making each exhibition of A Study in Portraiture a city-specific act in a play (hence the titling ‘Act I’, ‘Act II’, etc.) where the sitter has the ability to realize and portray a character. Referencing the 1960s West African photographs by Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe as well as the 18th century society portraits by British painter Thomas Gainsborough, she addresses the historical complicity in constructed identity and image assumed by both subject and artist. Like these artists, she also documents a social culture: hers being the exclusive contemporary art world. And through the interrogation of individual art communities (Los Angeles, London, New York, Chicago, and more), she and those who participate jointly construct a referential identity of the art world as a whole.

Involving much more than mere photography, her practice entails a conceptual strategy that incorporates performance, theater, painting, sculpture, and sociology. The resulting photographic image represents these elements in one captured moment with all its beautiful ambiguity and intrigue. It is a ‘play-still.’

Cantrell’s portrait studio remains in the gallery functioning as the site for scheduled weekly sessions throughout the duration of the show and as an installation when not in use.  There will be selected framed portraits from  ‘Act I’ on display and instant 4×5 photographs will be added to the wall as each London session progresses. The website www.studyinportraiture.com is a documentary component to the series featuring project history, images of the sessions, portrait photographs, and news.

Heather Cantrell (lives/works in Los Angeles) received her MFA from UCLA in 2001 and her BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1995. Her work has been shown in the touring museum exhibition Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists curated by Matthew Higgs (Singing Sirens is featured on catalog cover) and the recent group exhibitions LA: 2019 Cults, Collectives and Cocooning curated by Ciara Ennis at 18th Street Art Center, Celebration at Circus Gallery, Group Show at Black Dragon Society, and Flowing, Pulsing, Beating, Burning curated by Roger Dickes. Solo gallery shows include Century’s End at sixspace in Los Angeles and Extended Family at Newman Popiashvili Gallery in New York. Reviews of her work have been published in Artforum, Los Angeles Weekly, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Frieze, Index, and Wired Magazine. A Study in Portraiture: Act I debuted at Kinkead Contemporary in Los Angeles this past summer.

MOTInternational 54 Regents Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 4QN / info@motinternational.org, +44 (0)20 7923 9561, +44(0)7931 305 104 / Open Wednesday through Saturday from 11am-6pm

Download full press release here

Heather Cantrell
Kinkead Contemporary

For eight weeks last summer, Heather Cantrell’s “A Study in Portraiture: Act I” transformed part of Kinkead Contemporary into a functioning portrait studio equipped with a stockpile of costumes and props: painted backdrops, animal skins, cardboard cutouts of wolves  and snakes, silk flowers, hats, masks, and household objects. And during the exhibition’s run, Cantrell held a series of public photo shoots, to which she invited a subsection of the Los Angeles art community. With her input, participants could choose accoutrements and a backdrop. (For some special individuals, the artist made her own nude body available for placement in the scene.) After arranging the sitter in a bizarre pose, Cantrell took two black-and-white images in quick succession with a 4 x 5 camera: One, a negative, went to the artist’s archives; the other, a Polaroid, was added to an accumulating display on the gallery’s wall. Also on view was a formal presentation of unique prints from sessions held at Cantrell’s studio in the summer of 2008, marking the origin of the project. One of the most successful images in that group, A Study in Portraiture (Ben Lord), 2008, where a young, determined-looking artist readily holds a balloon sword, was also the simplest.

You can read the full review here via PDF .

What has made Heather Cantrell such an interesting photographer over the last few years has been her ability to interrogate the underpinnings, conventions and functions of photography and its particular genres while nonetheless extending, and even honoring, the very traditions she problematizes. She is simultaneously conceptualist, classicist and critic in the most engaged sense. She’s also — sometimes more goofily, sometimes more dryly — playful and humorous, and there’s no better example than her current exhibition at Kinkead Contemporary, which strikes somewhere between goofy and dry…READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW HERE

A Study in Portraiture: Act I

There are upcoming portrait sessions scheduled on the following dates (contact the gallery to participate or drop by just to watch):

August 14 (Tuesday) from 4-8pm
August 18 (Saturday) form 1-4pm

Los Angeles-based photographer Heather Cantrell lays elaborate groundwork for her seemingly fresh and casual portraits. Employing props, costumes, and references to both Western art history and tribal ritual, she deconstructs the mechanisms of portraiture, subverting the genre’s claims to truth and accuracy in the construction of identity. Her work is both profound and transparently DIY; she further lays her process bare as she transforms one of the gallery’s rooms into a functioning portrait studio, in which she’ll practice her craft before a live audience throughout the exhibition’s run — volunteers wanted.

When Heather Cantrell began her Polaroid portrait project, now called A Study in Portraiture, last summer it instantly crystallized what she has been conceptually doing throughout her past four bodies of work. I’ve had the pleasure of working with her for the last six years (starting in 2003 at my former gallery, sixspace) and have steadily seen the performative aspect grow and morph into things she was already exploring such as fictional narratives and sub-cultural identities. I have also seen how, because she is using photography, the viewer reads the surface image without considering what lies beneath. But as I was sitting in her studio last July, sweating underneath a sheep mask and intensely hot lights, I realized that these portraits best represent the conceptual core of her work…READ THE REST HERE

Welcome to the documentation website of Heather Cantrell’s A Study in Portraiture Series where you can read about the project, view portrait and behind-the-scenes images, find out about planned exhibitions, and learn about the artist. As each “act” gets completed, videos and new portraits will be added. Look soon too for interviews with the artist and participants.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Heather for many years now, beginning with showing her at my Los Angeles gallery in 2003. Now as an independent curator, I’m thrilled to be working with her on new projects and delving further into the conceptual practices at play within her often complicated work. Be sure to visit the site often as it will be growing along with the project!

-Caryn Coleman, project curator
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