LA-based photographer Ken Gonzales-Day to premiere his 2012 Creative Capital Award Project "RUN UP" in his second solo exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

KEN GONZALES-DAY: RUN UP

APRIL 4 - MAY 9, 2015

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 4, 6-8 pm

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles will premiere LA-based photographer Ken Gonzales-Day's newest series of photographs and his first film: RUN UP, on view at the gallery from April 4 through May 9, 2015.  RUN UP is a project of Creative Capital, which Gonzales-Day was awarded in 2012.

RUN UP is the latest chapter in Ken Gonzales-Day's acclaimed Erased Lynching series, selections of which have been acquired by the Smithsonian Institution and the Norton Museum of Art and have also been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, London, Paris, Vienna, Mexico City, and Bogota, among others.

The central work in the exhibition will be a new short film and still images from a restaging of a 1920 lynching of a Latino in California. Gonzales-Day created the film and related photographic series to bring greater visibility to the presence of Latino's in the history of lynching and to draw parallels between the past and the present.  Unlike previous bodies of work in which Gonzales-Day used found or archival imagery, the contemporary restaging highlights not only the history of lynching nationwide, but draws clear parallels with contemporary events like Ferguson.

The film and still images depict events surrounding the lynching of Charles Valento, also known as "Spanish Charley", who was one of three men (two Anglo and one Latino) to be lynched in Santa Rosa, California, in 1920.  The details surrounding the case were drawn from the Coroner's report and Gonzales-Day's own archival research that strongly suggests that police officers were present at the 1920 lynching-which the press mischaracterized as mob vigilantism.

The primary difference between this project and conventional narrative depictions of lynching and vigilantism previously found in films (ranging from Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns to Steve McQueen's recent 12 Years a Slave), is that in Gonzales-Day's film the victim's body is not visible in the final moments of the scene. The absence of the lynching victim in this film, and accompanying photographic series, intentionally seeks to disrupt the normative power of racial victimization, raise awareness about America's lynching victims (Asians, Latinos,  African Americans, and Native Americans) and reflect on the broader question of capital punishment and police brutality currently taking place in the United States.

The exhibition includes restaged period imagery of the 1920 lynching reenactment with stills shot in Los Angeles during the protest marches that took place in the days following the Grand Jury's decision in Ferguson, Missouri, not to indict Darren Wilson, the white police Officer involved in the shooting death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teen.  A third series of images document the destructive aftermath of the riots in locations throughout the city of Ferguson as well as images documenting memorials honoring Ezell Ford, the mentally ill young man killed by police in South Los Angeles.  In combining these seemingly distant events, the exhibition draws parallels between the history of lynching and police shootings today, at times blending the two events to create images that collapse history and provocatively speak to our own time.

Ken Gonzales-Day lives and works in Los Angeles, and is professor of art at Scripps College, Claremont, CA. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the first LACMA Photo Arts Council (PAC) Prize, Creative Capital Award; Chercheur Accueilli, Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (INHA); COLA (City of Los Angeles) Individual Artist Award; Art Matters Grant; California Community Foundation/Getty Trust Mid-Career Award; Durfee Fondation ACG; Graves Award for the Humanities; Visiting Scholar/Artist-in-Residence, Getty Research Institute; Senior Fellow, American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution; Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy; and, Van Lier Fellow, ISP (Independent Study Program), Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

For further information and images, please contact Luis De Jesus at 310-838-6000, or email: gallery@luisdejesus.com

Ken Gonzales-Day: RUN UP

April 4 - May 9, 2015

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

2685 S. La Cienega Blvd

Los Angeles, CA 90034

www.luisdejesus.com