Katy Grannan: New Works

Solo exhibition

In the two new series, titled "Sugar Camp Road" and "Morning Call," Grannan photographs her sitters in both intimate and public settings. Each project references the visual history of portraiture in painting and photography and explores the desire to be immortalized in a still image. Grannan’s portraits are encounters with strangers, half-truths which draw upon happenstance, tension, and the power of the unknown.

Grannan's new color series entitled "Sugar Camp Road" (on view at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren) consists of portraits made in public parks around Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. Many of the seemingly innocuous landscapes belie sordid pasts, and public space is transformed into private theatre in the final images.

Portraits in the new black and white series entitled "Morning Call" (on view at Salon 94) were begun around Allentown, PA. Grannan photographs the inhabitants and interiors of an area documented by Walker Evans in the 1930s and 40s. Grannan similarly employs a documentary style in a subjective description of the complex psychological landscape of her sitters and the dynamic between the artist and her subject. The installation will also feature wall tattoos by the artist Kara Hamilton, who uses the repeated motifs in Grannan’s photographs as inspiration for her imagery.

Katy Grannan received her BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from Yale University. The artist has exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and The Orange County Museum of Art, LA, CA, among others. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; and The Guggenheim Museum, NY; and has been featured in ArtForum and The New York Times Magazine, among others.