Image above: Farrah Karapetian and her mother during the opening night at Danziger Gallery. ©Ashley Comer.
Danziger Gallery presented on September 10th, 2015 the first New York solo exhibition of work by the Los Angeles based artist Farrah Karapetian. Since 2002, Karapetian has been exploring the form of the photogram to create unique large scale cameraless works that blend performance and photographic process.
Images above: ©Farrah Karapetian, (left) The Three Muses, 2014; (right) Soundscape 44, 2015. Courtesy of Danziger Gallery.
Her subjects are both personal and political. In the 2011 series “Accessory to Protest:”, the taking off point was a news photograph of police in Kyrgyzstan being stoned by protesters Karapetian recreated the image with friends posing as police in her studio. In 2013, the focus of the work was the muscle memory of U.S. Armed Forces veterans and their relationship to their weapons – once again using real people to create life size cameraless works.
Image above: During the opening night at Danziger Gallery. ©Ashley Comer.
In her newest series, “Stagecraft”, which will be exhibited in all three rooms of the gallery, Karapetian combines the idea of music, performance, and the form of musical instruments to produce luminously colored images. Using both real instruments and a skeletal and translucent drum set fabricated by the artist, Karapetian alternates abstracted still lives of instruments with life size photograms of musicians, often caught at moments of rest before or after the implication of sound.
