Group Show Theaters of Fiction at Wellin Museum in Upstate New York
Several of Kereszi’s works are included in a group show at the Wellin Museum, which recently acquired several of her pieces for their permanent collection. Theaters of Fiction also includes work by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Carrie Mae Weems, Candida Hofer, Rhona Bittner, and others.
Opening February 16th, 2019 and on view through June 19th.
Wellin Museum
Hamilton College
198 College Hill Road
Clinton, NY
In the exhibition catalog, the curator Katherine Alcauskas, writes: “In multiple series since the late 1990s, including Fantasies, Fun and Games, The Party’s Over, and Haunted, Lisa Kereszi has recorded not the bourgeois theater or opera house, but more egalitarian spaces of ‘entertainment,’ where viewers go to enact fantasies or escape from daily life, including strip clubs, haunted houses, amusement parks, and movie theaters. Her interest is not to celebrate such locations, necessarily, but to strip away the “thinly veiled facade” to reveal the banal—even gritty—nature of such spaces… Within these spaces of democratic entertainment, Kereszi searches for human relics: ‘I go into a space that has been inhabited and look for the trails and traces people leave behind.’ It is these vestiges of human activity and diversion that remain even after the physical spaces are long abandoned. In focusing on the remnants of enjoyment, her photographs often address a perceived intimacy that is ultimately artificial, sold to and replicated for each visitor, revealing what one critic has called ‘the intersection of private self and public illusion.’ While the personal desires that stimulate each individual to pursue a public fantasy are private, they are enacted within a shared space.”
Posted on 29 December 2018
