Hagar Cygler, of the LA Reciprocity Retreat, has her mid-res show at CalArts starting this Thursday, January 21. The show will take place at the Mint Gallery in CalArts (4th floor) and will include a selection of the best of her most recent work.
Following the opening receiption, the show will be open until Friday, January 22nd for those who cannot make the opening.
In Hagar’s practice, photography is a fundamental starting point for her work, however her artistic practice is not photographic per se, but rather combines a variety of techniques of organization, craft, video and the use of objects trouvés in a multimedia work of art. Cygler deals with memory in reference to its material presence in our lives, and with the change that resulted from technological progress, while coping with distance in time and space. she seeks to examine what happens to a photograph – a material object whose main value is visual – when it becomes worthless: What defines it as important? What is its material essence? What does it represent? She works in a broad context of archives, collection, and hoarding of materials, straddling the tension produced by the act of sorting out the important and unimportant, and ask how a database that is not only personal or historical can be categorized and organized. She is preoccupied with questions such as what are the parameters for classification, why some things are destined to disappear from the world, and how do we look ahead, while investigating layers of visual, verbal and sensory knowledge. She deliberately chooses worn-out images and objects to examine the use of nature as an integral part of western culture and consumer culture in particular, and intervening in the iconic image. These acts reveal how the image functions within the archive as cultural memory.
More information:
https://www.facebook.com/events/979914645396243/
