FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – OCTOBER 20, 2015

KAREN FINLEY – Broad Museum Performance and Coagula Solo Show.

Solo Show Love Field opens November 21 at Coagula Curatorial in Los Angeles. Exhibit opening coincides with Finley performances at the Broad Museum.

LOS ANGELES - Coagula Curatorial is pleased to announce Love Field, a solo show of new work by world-renowned artist Karen Finley. The artist has been studying the traumatic images surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Here she presents reworkings of common and uncommon images associated with the tumultuous events and personalities surrounding November 22, 1963.

Love Field refers to the Dallas Airport that Jackie and Jack Kennedy landed at on November 22, 1963. Here are some of the series she presents in the exhibit:

PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

Representing the visualization of selective memory - a way of remembering and forgetting - Finley created Presence of Absence, a series of ink studies that abstract and fragment gestures, body parts and clothing that seem to disappear and haunt.

THE JACKIE LOOK SERIES

In reference to the infamous Warhol series of portraits of Jackie Kennedy, Finley’s The Jackie Look Series repeats the worshipped face yet doesn’t try to hold time, nor looks for perfection, but rather allows for transformation of the interior from cartoonish to mysterious to the grotesque.

LOVE FIELD SERIES

In the Love Field Series, Finley highlights the significance of red roses given to Jackie after Air Force One had landed there. This was a break from the Texas tradition for visiting dignitaries to receive the yellow Texas Rose.

GRASSY KNOLL

In Grassy Knoll, the artist pays homage to stills from the Zapruder film as a way of seeing certain meaning and conspiracy in frames that hold the utmost of tragic consequence but remain within a context of the tradition of landscape painting.

CAMERA MISFIRE

In Camera Misfire, Finley uses archived camera misfires from negative sheets of photographs as the source to draw from and represent the camera as weapon. The term “camera misfire” is when out-of-frame preservation of inessential areas are kept and archived to preserve all relative association for an uncertain future.

The artist will also premiere a series of videos abstracted from memorabilia and images associated with the tragedy.

The exhibit opens Saturday, November 21 and continues thru

Sunday, January 3, 2016. Coagula Curatorial is open WED – SUN, 1-6 PM.

The gallery is in Downtown L.A.’s historic Chinatown

at 974 Chung King Road, Los Angeles 90012.

The exhibition opening coincides with the Los Angeles debut of Finley’s performance entitled The Jackie Look. She will be the first performer at the new Broad Museum on November 20 and 21. She will perform The Jackie Look tailored to the Los Angeles audience.

Finley will appear as Jackie Kennedy Onassis looking back at her images in photographs. Using the structure of a lecture set in the present day, Jackie contemplates her life in pictures and society’s projection onto her as a monument of grief and mourning. The performance is site specific, meaning Finley will situate Jackie to address the city or institution that she is invited to. But the performance speaks and includes her return to Dallas and the following memories. Finley will use the performance opportunity to consider the trauma of our nation’s historical imagery and to be conscious of the healing power of the transformation of our painful memory landscape into new images of promise and imagination. Included in the text is Jackie considering the public viewing of Michele Obama as First Lady.

Using the presentation as a prepared talk by Jackie Kennedy reflecting on traumatic documentation, we see Finley depict the first lady witnessing the collective iconic imagery and coming to terms with world projection amidst her personal pain. For the performance Jackie is a stand in as an archetype for all of us. For these Los Angeles performances there will be a heightened moment with remembering the Ambassador hotel. Accompanying the performance text will be montages of images abstracted and iconic and Jackie will be sure to visit souvenir shops and ebay for JFK memorabilia.

Media inquiries and interview requests please contact the gallery:
Coagula Curatorial: 88gallery @ gmail.com