Michele O’Marah’s work examines themes of beauty, glamour, and community through the technological lens of the video portrait, while Home Show: Revisited reimagines the home as a site to question the elements of community and everyday life.
This two piece catalog first highlights the work of Michele O’Marah, whose filmmaking and installations focus on themes relating to power dynamics, appropriation, and subversive ideology, while referencing Hollywood and its role and effects on society. Her referential Video Portraits serve as a reinvention of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, investigating the act of looking and the subtleties of the subject. The portraits, displayed on numerous “old school” televisions within the SBCAF galleries, continue O’Marah’s work examining the (continue to examine) themes of beauty, glamour, and community through a technological lens that creates new understandings of mortality, memory, and time.
Co-Curated by O’Marah and SBCAF Executive Director, Miki Garcia, Home Show: Revisited takes 10 Los Angeles based artists into 10 Santa Barbara homes for multifaceted, deeply involved installations. The venue of the home takes on the idea of community and the diverse pieces that form it. The slew of artists using various media, taking on different issues, and from their own diverse backgrounds make up a snapshot of the Los Angeles art community, and Santa Barbara by extension. Images of the installations bring the viewer into the realms of art and community as a guest in the home, or as an individual privy to what goes on behind closed doors. Each artist’s installation is, whether a focus on voyeurism, suburbanism, community, secrets, dilapidation, or otherwise, a unique look into the pieces that form a neighborhood, a community, and eventually society.
Re-envisioning the idea of home, reconsidering the historical context and evolution that a modern home has resulted from, reimagining all that goes on behind doors and curtains, recreating the rituals that take place there, and reassessing the roles of its inhabitants, the exhibition opens the door to the unconsidered meanings of the home and everyday life.
The catalog also includes an interview between Miki Garcia and Michele O’Marah, as well as a fold-out site map of the installations.
Exhibiting artists in HSR include: Piero Golia, Evan Holloway, Bettina Hubby, Florian Morlat, Kori Newkirk, Jennifer Rochlin, Ry Rocklen, Kirsten Stoltmann, Stephanie Taylor, & Jennifer West.
Each artist produced a limited edition print in conjunction with the exhibition. Prints available for purchase from MCASB.
Produced in conjunction with the exhibitions at SBCAF: Michele O’Marah: Video Portraits and Home Show: Revisited, May 21 - July 17, 2011.
Softcover, 139 pages, 112 color photographs and video stills, LHW 8” x 9” x 0.75”
