Sandroni.Rey

Sandroni. Rey is pleased to announce Lightyear, Farrah Karapetian’s first solo show with the gallery. Through new photograms, video, and sculpture, Karapetian explores the contemporary political landscape of Southern California as well as her preoccupation with the passage of time. Modes of transportation and concerns with surveillance figure strongly in the pieces on exhibit as does Karapetian’s unique regard for the plastic nature of photographic process.

The 20 x 10 foot photogram Stowaway mimics the X-Ray technology currently used to identify illegal immigrants inside trucks at U.S. border crossings and shows the interior of a moving van replete with V-8 engine, Mexican Coke bottles, and a man. In Driver’s Side, a driver’s side door frames an animated video of a 3-mile stretch of La Cienega where commercial storefronts give way to oil fields. In We All Go The Same Way Home, a bus shelter frames self-portraits of the artist at 30 and, altered by forensic age-progression specialists, at 70.  The show’s eponymous piece, Lightyear, is a video projection on the gallery floor that uses a 3d body scan of the artist as the center of a sundial to consider issues of pace and place.

Other images on exhibition include photograms made from signage familiar from the urban landscape, such as those warning of surveillance technologies; Karapetian has animated these signs by contact printing them multiple times in each photogram. Each piece on display derives from Karapetian’s observations of the neighborhood of her studio and exhibits the elasticity with which she regards the conventions of both the photographic process and its display.