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The photographer and filmmaker's brand new exhibition is set to include her most sinister, sensational work to date
Alex Prager’s laboriously poised photographs ooze the synthetic and cinematic glamour of life in Los Angeles, so it’s entirely appropriate that the 36-year-old artist and photographer has turned to the medium of film to capture her dynamic compositions in recent years. Her newest video work, which marks a progression from the film stills she has previously displayed in photographic form, are an unabashed celebration of old school Hollywood techniques – an ode to Hitchcock and his peers, and their preferred style of storytelling. “I love the lighting from Hollywood movies of the Golden Era, from the movies of the 1920s until the 50s,” she once remarked. “With that kind of lighting, anything can happen. It draws you in. There can be a lot of dark things happening – things that might not have been pleasant to watch, but the lighting aestheticises them and makes watching the movie irresistible.”
Prager’s ability to toy with her readers’ emotions steps up a notch in her new project, La Grande Sortie, which goes on display this month at the Galerie des Galeries in France. Set at the opening performance of a new ballet in Paris, we are informed that it is the first performance of the principal dancer since she "went away," and not long after the elaborate dance begins the scene begins to unravel in the most sinister of ways
As in her previous work, the recognisable yellow lighting of golden era cinema paired with the exaggerated gestures of her cast creates an unfamiliar subversion of the audience’s expectations; it’s equal parts uncanny and and impossible to look away from, like the doomed ending of a soap opera, or a pantomime death. Unsurprisingly, La Grande Sortie is completely compelling.
The technical skill at play behind the scenes of this piece, as with her other intricately crafted works, is not to be understated, as the director of Galerie des Galeries Elise Jansse explains in her introductory essay on the exhibit. “The [2013] film Face in the Crowd, her most iconic work to date, was directed like a feature film,” Janssen explains. “Soundstages, dedicated teams, 350 extras; the script however, had not been written out. Each actor, having been dressed, made up and turned into a character by Prager, had a personal story to tell. Singular, unique stories, specific to each individual composing a crowd. Stories that affect us, evoked by characters of intriguing appearance.”
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Likewise, her methods for evoking spontaneous and authentic responses from her models, or rather her ‘actors’, are somewhat unusual. “On set, she will scare her actors by screaming or spraying water at them so as to get the kind of reaction she expects,” Janssen continues. “Surreal though her shots might appear, they always capture an element of reality: for art’s sake, Prager will go to such lengths as literally plunging a car into a pool of black water or filming the ocean from a helicopter.” With such elaborate means of composing her past works, we await the arrival of La Grande Sortie with great anticipation.
Alex Prager: La Grande Sortie will be on display at Galerie des Galeries until January 23, 2016.
