Sarah Morris: Los Angeles
July 10—October 9, 2005The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presented a new film by Sarah Morris from July 10 through October 9, 2005.
The Aldrich screened Los Angeles, a recent film by Morris that captured a week in the life of the city, known as a center for film production, on the eve of its annual Oscar Awards celebration. Los Angeles provides a peek inside an industry famous for its promise of fantasy, depicting shots of Botox injections and laser surgery paired with images of Oscar rehearsals, and legendary Hollywood producers such as Robert Evans and Dino de Laurentiis. Interspersed with these images are shots of the city's landscape-its characteristic architecture and famous sites to its urban sprawl-underscoring the intrinsic relationship of the environment to the people who inhabit these spaces.
A painter and filmmaker, Morris's recent body of work focuses on the aesthetic, architecture, and psychology of Los Angeles as a sprawling, de-centered urban location. She describes her films as "condensed manifestos," in the sense that they are a compendium of images and situations. These films investigate both the city's surface, as well as its inhabitants and key players. Employing different types of cinematography from a documentary-like approach, as well as narrative sequences, her approach distracts the viewer to allow for a closer observation of issues of social power.
Morris's work was included in Glee: Painting Now at The Aldrich in 2000. She has exhibited at Neue National Gallerie, Berlin; Kunsthalle Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; and at Le Consortium, Dijon.
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Sarah Morris, Los Angeles, 2004, 35mm/DVD, running time: 26 minutes 12 seconds
Sarah Morris, Los Angeles, 2004, 35mm/DVD, running time: 26 minutes 12 seconds
Top of page: Sarah Morris, Los Angeles, 2004, 35mm/DVD, running time: 26 minutes 12 seconds
