Katy Grannan: Mystic Lake

Solo exhibition

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographs by Katy Grannan, from January 4 – February 4, 2006. Mystic Lake is the artist’s third one-person exhibition at the gallery. Recent museum group exhibitions featuring Grannan’s work include Girls Night Out at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Some Body, Not Mine at Prague’s Rudolfinum, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial, among others. A new hardcover monograph Katy Grannan: Model American was recently published by Aperture. A concurrent exhibition of Mystic Lake will be held at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

Mystic Lake will feature approximately a dozen medium format color photographs. Grannan’s recent portraits feature models in outdoor settings in and around Mystic Lake, an area just outside of Boston, MA. As with her previous work, the artist’s subjects pose and perform in front of the artist’s camera, producing images that are once startling and poignant. In her essay for the Model American, Jan Avgikos probes the relationship between Grannan and her sitters:

Katy Grannan mines the fertile divide – social, economic, aesthetic – between us and them. Her portraits probe deeply into the underbelly of cultural difference with emphasis on personal values and contrasts between big-city life and the small towns and rural areas that exist far beyond the periphery of the center. The people she photographs are strangers to her, but the routes she travels...correspond curiously to her own personal road map. Her own experiences and identification with life in locales that stretch from the Hudson River Valley to Mystic Lake in Massachusetts, near her hometown, serve as a springboard to orchestrate encounters that supersede the so-called documentary impulse in photography. For a brief time, she and they become intimate strangers, mirroring each other’s motivations and creating a drama that draws us in as the viewer and gives us a prominent role to play.

Katy Grannan was born 1969 in Arlington, MA and currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA. She received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.F.A. from Yale University. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Artforum, and Art in America, among others, and is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.