#Alex Prager photography

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

TALL CANS & SMOKES ALL AROUND... "TREADING THE LINE BEYOND REALITY AND ARTIFICE."

PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on my favorite of all Alex's pieces -- Top image: "The Big Valley: Susie and Friends," by Alex Prager, c. 2008 © Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

CAUSING A SCENE: "Growing up under the pristine skies of Hollywood Boulevard, the film industry’s greatest exporter in melodrama and fantasy, the line between reality and artifice was always something of a blur for renowned photographer Alex Prager.

Therefore it seems only natural that she would imbibe many of the same aesthetic codes through her work, but whereas Hollywood sells dreams, Prager interrogates them: using photography and film to examine the interplay between fact and fiction, light and dark, perfection and chaos. These are just some of the inherent tensions that lie at the centre of her ten year oeuvre and which now, on the eve of her first mid-career retrospective, she is breaking down and shuffling into order."

-- HERO-MAGAZINE, "Treading the line between reality and artifice with renowned photographer Alex Prager," by Finn Blythe, published June 18, 2018

Source: https://hero-magazine.com/article/124604/treading-the-line-between-reality-and-artifice-with-renowned-photographer-alex-prager.

[noxandlove]

Elizabeth Olsen for W Magazine, 2011

[miamaimania]

Alex Prager's cinematicTableView ➤

[mudwerks]

(via Blue: Art for the Ocean Curated by Jefferson Hack | AnOther)

Alex Prager (b. 1979), Renee, 2010

[ars-solitudine]

Alex Prager

[theaskew]

Alex Prager (American b. 1979, lives and works in Los Angeles), California, Too, 2024. Archival pigment print, 121.9 x 121.9 cm. | 48 x 48 in.

[eric-generic]

Alex Prager

[bobbole]

Alex Prager, Cats, 2017

[leggerezza-dell-essere]

_____ Alex Prager

[elixir]

Alex Prager, 2017

[lessthanawesome]

Alexandra, 2007

Alex Prager

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

ONLINE FINDS FOR THE CURIOUS KINDS -- THE BEGINNING OF THE END IS NIGH.

NOTE: ^So, I'm thinking of retiring these "Tumblr Cover photo" sets next year, but I really haven't made up my mind about it yet. These take up a lot of my time, and I'm thinking of just focusing on singular posts for the foreseeable future.

PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on more December cover photos, and the third to the last set of the entire year -- and I'll be putting this series to rest two more posts from now.

In this set, I am featuring:

"Spider-Man -- The Todd McFarlane Era" trading card artwork, cover art to the "Ten to Twenty" (1999) single by the SNEAKER PIMPS, the Trendkill Snake from PANTERA's "The Great Southern Trendkill," the Sea-goddess/Sea-witch from "Conan the Barbarian" Vol. 1 #98, a photography piece titled "The Big Valley: Susie and Friends" by Alex Prager, a promotional image for the "Li II" resin sculpture by McFarlane Toys, a 1996 Japanese BJÖRK concert tour poster, and a live shot of Dutch hardcore punk band B.G.K. (BALTHASAR GERARDS KOMMANDO).

Sources: Beckett's Marketplace, Pinterest, Alternative Tentacles, McFarlane Toys, View Comic Online, discogs, Worship Metal, various, etc...

[the-paradigm-web]

Alex Prager, Four girls, 2007..

[miamaimania]

꩜ Whispers in the Dark ➤

[longlistshort]

It’s hard not to be delighted by Alex Prager’s latest exhibition, Part Two: Run at Lehmann Maupin gallery in NYC. Upon arriving on the lower level of the gallery you are met with a pinball machine, brightly colored photos, and the sculpture of a woman’s body with her head crushed under a giant silver ball. In the next room, the short film Run sucks you in to it’s strange world.

From the press release-

Directly responding to a period of cultural ambivalences and uncertainties, the exhibition urgently examines human perseverance and explores the opportunities for empathy, participation, and action present both within art and everyday life.

Across her practice, Prager crafts rich, often ambiguous narratives that examine the cultural mythologies and archetypes that shape collective existence. As she deploys and deconstructs artistic and narrative conventions, Prager explores how both our senses of self and our engagement with others are often mediated by familiar stories and tropes. Occupying a tenuous relationship to time and place, the artist’s carefully choreographed figures remain suspended between the past and the present, and Prager gestures to a collective will to exist that not only transcends our immediate circumstances but persists despite them.

The foundation for Prager’s latest body of work is the artist’s powerful new film, Run. Featuring musical compositions by Ellen Reid and Philip Glass and starring Katherine Waterston, the film deploys cinematic archetypes and absurdist humor as it examines human resilience in the face of catastrophe. An otherwise ordinary day in an uncannily generic setting erupts into chaos when a massive, mirrored sphere propels itself through a community. Here, forward motion is countered by retrospection. Figures collide into their own reflections in the sphere’s surface, and Prager suggests a curative, collective reckoning with those forces outside of our control.

The New York exhibition presents Run in dialogue with photographs and sculptures that further complicate and enrich the film’s fundamental concerns. Prager’s photographic work Sleep (2022) shows the intricately staged mass of people from Run, as they momentarily lay on the ground, after each colliding with the accelerating mirrored ball. Sleep humorously deconstructs the conventions of the film still, and Prager unveils the absurdist potential of suspending a single moment in time. Dramatizing the scene’s ambiguities, the work offers a narrative with a multitude of possible conclusions. Directly engaging the film’s central image, Prager’s sculpture Ball (2022) shows a hyper-realistic figure of a woman, whose head appears to be crushed by the mirrored sphere. As viewers approach the object, they are likewise confronted by their reflections, and they, too, become enfolded within Prager’s lively narratives. Here, as throughout the exhibition, Prager invites viewers into her visually and symbolically saturated works, suggesting that they, too, have critical parts to play.

Part Two: Run marks the culmination of a multipart exhibition, which also included distinct presentations at Lehmann Maupin Palm Beach in November 2022 and Lehmann Maupin London in January 2022.

Make sure to head to the top floor of the gallery as well, where the exhibition continues with more photographs.

This exhibition closes 3/4/23.

[icelogged]

Alex Prager

Part One: The Mountain Eclipse, 2021 48 x 40.3 inches