Genevieve Gaignard: Counterfeit Currency

SEPTEMBER 13 - SEPTEMBER 22, 2018

Genevieve Gaignard: Counterfeit Currency is the LA-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. The new self-portraits and collages, all created in Florida, continue Gaignard’s interest in the performance of race, gender presentation, beauty standards, and class, through fictional personas and staged environments. The title, Counterfeit Currency, addresses the inherent complexities of self-presentation, noting that the way one appears to others is often incongruent with the way in which they see themselves, yielding a feeling of displacement and fraudulence.

Through a variety of female archetypes, Gaignard explores her own existence as a mixed-race woman of color, revealing the malleability of identity as something both self-constructed and culturally affected. In addition to photographic works, the artist will also present a new series of collages that combine vintage wallpaper and magazine cutouts to render dreamlike and satirical narratives.

In her full-floor installation at FLAG, Gaignard creates multiple “mise-en-abîme” environments in which objects depicted in her cinematic photographs and collages are present in the gallery’s space. Incorporating personal and politically-loaded objects, one vignette is furnished with vintage wall paper, rattan furniture, and a spring of porcelain black panther figurines, while another holds appearance-altering beauty products, such as skin-bleaching creams, face masks, and makeup. Seen together, the objects contained within the artist’s physiological spaces are designed to challenge assumptions and widen our understanding of each character. Like Federico Fellini’s film within a film 8½ (1963), Gaignard’s self-reflexive stage-like installations create an undercurrent of displacement and awareness that everything on view is a construction.

Serving as a central piece within the exhibition, Seeing is Believing, 2018, features a black mirror installed amidst a wallpapered sea of white, female Victorian faces. While the women gaze in judgement, the viewer is confronted with his or her own image, darkened by the mirror. Regardless of race, this piece underscores the distress of being seen as “other” and brings to the forefront the complexities of race and racism.

Gaignard’s practice developed alongside the rise of “selfie culture,” which promotes shared social performance and constructed alternate realities. The context of such a self-conscious moment differentiates Gaignard’s work from other artists, such as Cindy Sherman, Nikki S. Lee, and Renée Cox, who also use the medium of photography and self-portraiture as a means of examining female identity. Gaignard cites drag culture, specifically the performer Divine, and film director John Waters as inspiration for the employment of kitsch as a methodology to disarm and engage viewers.

About:

Genevieve Gaignard (b. 1981, Orange, MA) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Gaignard received her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA, in 2007, and her MFA in Photography from Yale University, New Haven, CT, in 2014. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions including Hidden Fences, Praz Delavallade, Paris, France (2018); Prospect 4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, New Orleans, LA (2017); In Passing, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX (2017); The Powder Room, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA (2017); and Smell the Roses, at the California African American Museum (2016); among others. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture, curated by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Fictions, curated by Connie H. Choi and Hallie Ringle, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2017); among others. Gaignard has been the subject of articles and reviews in publications including Artforum, Artsy, Cultured Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, W Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, VICE, among others.

Press:

“The express ornaments of black culture that appear in some of Gaignard’s images—braids and Afros, head wraps and African prints—like all surfaces, can be borrowed. The photographs remind us, repeatedly, that the racial delineations imposed by society are often arbitrary and flimsy, always fraught.”

— Katie Ryder, The New Yorker

“It’s these types of subtle personal touches in all the mediums she works in, that makes Gaignard's insights and cultural observations so incredibly magnetic. And with that resonation, Gaignard's work contemplate their own understanding of the world and identity.”

— Alexandria Deters, Gallery Gurls

“I am fascinated by what people choose to surround themselves with in their domestic spaces and the objects that make a place feel like home, so in this way installation work felt like a very natural progression.

— Genevieve Gaignard, Wonderland

“Gaignard’s best works are her self-portraits, which feature the artist donning an array of outfits and performing a set of vaguely recognizable types—a gaudy suburban matriarch, a city slicker, a devilish temptress.”

— Alex Greenberger, ARTnews

“Genevieve Gaignard’s work is deceptive—and that’s no accident. Her pleasingly arranged collages, heavily knick-knacked installations of cozy-looking domestic interiors, and well-lit, cheerfully colorful portrait photography draw the viewer in, belying her willingness to confront the sensitive issues of race, stereotypes, beauty standards, consumption, and identity.”

— Sarah Cascone, Artnet