Ken Gonzales-Day

Untitled from the Dysmorphologies Series Abstract Large Color Photograph

This extra large montage of photographs is mounted onto aluminum from Ken Gonzales-Day's dysmorphologies series. Photo paper mounted to aluminum. Ken Gonzales-Day's interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems ranging from the lynching photograph to museum display. The Searching for California Hang Trees series offered a critical look at the legacies of landscape photography in the West while his most recent project considers the sculptural depiction of race. Profiled began as an exploration of the influence of eighteenth century "scientific" thought on twenty-first century institutions ranging from the museum to the prison and extended to the sculpture and portrait bust collections of several major museums including: The J. Paul Getty Museum; The Field Museum, Chicago; The Museum of Man, San Diego; L'École des beaux-arts,Paris. The Bode Museum, Berlin, Park Sanssouci, Potsdam; The National Museum of Natural History, Paris; The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; among others. Gonzales-Day lives in Los Angeles and is Chair of the Art Department at Scripps College. Much of Gonzales-Day's work considers the larger political and social representational histories of the Mexican-American experience. His early work draws on the constructed photo methods of artists like Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, or Gregory Crewdson. For example, in Bone Grass Boy (1996), Gonzales-Day casts himself as all the central characters in a staged photonovella set during the Mexican American War. In a later series entitled Erased Lynchings (2004-2006), Gonzales-Day explores the history of lynching in the American West by appropriating and digitally altering an archive of 19th and 20th century postcards that depict Mexican and Mexican-American lynchings. In 2012, Gonzales-Day received the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Visual Arts. In 2014, he created his project titled Run Up which pairs together recreated images of lynchings from the 1920s and images of police brutality from Ferguson and Los Angeles. The title, Run Up, stems from the term for an illegal lynching. Court-ordered executions were called hangings while hate crimes were referred to as "run-ups". Along with his artwork, Gonzales-Day has authored two monographs. His first, Profiled, deals with the works of Malvina Hoffman...

FLORA & FAUNA SERIES, c.1998, Fuji crystal archive paper. Unsigned, Photographer Jeffrey Rothstein focuses on different elements within Nature for his subject matter, ranging from f...

Seeside (Zuma Beach) - 2004 48x47cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory #20430. Not...

Impressionistic photo of an autumn sunset reflected in tidal flats at low tide. Shot in Glen Cove, Long Island. Printed on archival fine art paper, mounted on dibond aluminum with ...