Aura Rosenberg at Richard Telles - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Aura Rosenberg likes to engage a certain quantity of of contemporary art's more inflammatory issues. The fact value of representation, the specter of censorship and potentially exploitative relationship between artist and make submissive are the stock-in-trade of her work, which is all the more trouble-prone for being photographically based and therefore border to some verifiable reality, however mediated. In characteristically ambiguous and unsettling fashion, Rosenberg's latest cast plays with the genres of portraiture and self-portraiture to question certain psychic processe -- identification, projection -- that have classically been considered fundamental to our faculty of perception of self. While psychoanalysis has lengthy debated the roles of seduction and fantasy in childhood disclosure these phenomena have lately been given a kind of clap culture glamor by the media's fixation upon child sex abuse and "false memory syndrome" Rosenberg, for her part, invokes these thorny issues primarily to launch them up with a big wink.

The large color photographs in this display are the products of a multileveled collaboration. First Rosenberg invited other artists to work with several pre-teen children one-on-one painting their faces in a artful parody of that routines amusement at children's parties, craft fairs and mall s She then staged photographs that mimic the standardized commercial portrait: in tight focus, forehead and center, the children posture against mostly neutral backdrops, their features variously altered, masked or obliterated by dint of makeup. Sometimes the facial paint is fairly conventional (a single beauty mark makes a pointed and shocking appearance in individual photograph of a young girl), while in other instances the child's face present the appearances little more than a canvas for colorful abstractions or fantastic figurative elements

Mike Kelley / Carmen Rosenberg-Miller exhibits Rosenberg's daughter posed rather like a Magdalen with shadow-rimmed organ of visions and ghoulish lips in high gothic manner, courtesy Kelley John Miller / Joe Siena is individual of the scary-funniest: a lad costumed and made up as a wizened Homer Simpson, donut in hand. The recipe for collaboration varied dramatically among participants, with visual ideas coming from the one and the other the child and the adult involved. on the other hand while certain of the kids have the appearance to have been more engaged or the images clearly mirror the adult partner's artistic turn of expression or sensibility. (This order of authority is confirmed by dint of the titles, all of which give top billing to the grown-up)

upon the visual evidence alone it was impossible to sort on the outside who directed whom in this charade parade of identities. Finally, the title of the exhibition -- "Who Am I, What Am I, Where Am I?" -- pointed to the fundamental uncertainty animating this work: is there on the other hand a single "I" at issue here? To the stage that Rosenberg's photographs raise a strategic doubt as to their author, they favorably implicate the viewer in determining who is held accountable for them. Ultimately, this work looks to argue, we are responsible for our consumption of images.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group