Alex Prager
— The Arts Club, London

Alex Prager, Crowd #8 (City Hall), 2013, Archival pigment print, 121.9 x 58.4 cm

Installation View: Alex Prager, The Arts Club

Alex Prager, Crowd 10 (Imperial Theatre), 2013

Alex Prager, Crowd 6 (Hazelwood), 2013

Alex Prager, Face in the Crowd Film Strip 4, 2013

Installation View: Alex Prager, The Arts Club

Installation View: Alex Prager, The Arts Club

Installation View: Alex Prager, The Arts Club

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Alex Prager, Crowd #8 (City Hall), 2013, Archival pigment print, 121.9 x 58.4 cm

This exhibition presents photographs from Alex Prager’s highly acclaimed Face in the Crowd series, which debuted at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2013 and will be one of the first opportunities to see her work in the U.K. 

Prager, who lives and works in L.A., draws upon the language of cinema. Face in the Crowd is a series of large-scale photographs of crowds of costumed actors taken on meticulously constructed sets. Prager assembles a cast of character types and the resulting images have a heightened aesthetic and capture a series of staged moments, which on first appearance mimic film stills. The references in Prager’s work are wide-ranging, from filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock to contemporary photographers such as William Eggleston. 

In this compelling series of new works, the level of artifice is explicit. The scenes were all shot on a Hollywood soundstage, in the case of the beach scene using twenty tons of sand. Prager’s characters sport costumes, hairstyles and make up which span eras from mid-century to the present day, and she deliberately chooses high viewpoints, giving the impression of a camera suspended above the crowd. While the settings she uses vary, from beach scenes to street corners and lobbies, Prager’s interest in exploring the two sides of a crowd is constant, as she explains: 

It can be a massive sea of strangers that become this anonymous cloud in your way. Or it can be all hundreds of beautiful special little individuals with their own experiential tracks.” 

– Alex Prager

The figures do not make eye contact, lending a heightened sense of dislocation. This effect of singling out individuals is all the more apparent in the new works presented in this exhibition, in which Prager uses a filmstrip format, interspersing close up images with shots of the crowd. Such qualities suggest solitary emotions and, seen within an exhibition context, an examination of mass spectacle. Viewers are drawn to individuals within each of Prager’s compositions and invited to construct narratives from the clues she presents. 

Prager (b. 1979, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works Los Angeles. Her work is represented in major museum collections including Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. Her editorial work has been featured in Vogue and W, and her film series Touch of Evil, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine, won an Emmy Award in 2012.

The exhibition is curated by Pernilla Holmes and Amelie von Wedel from Wedel Art.