Forty drawings (pencil on paper), 35 MM slide projector and 80 color slides
Drawings, each: 18 x 12 inches
Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchased with funds provided by the Acquisition and Collection Committee
“The people in LA were very distant, they weren’t accustomed to contact and I wanted to talk to them face to face. I got some acquaintances to come over to draw them and bring out human contact. Also, everything was very technological and had an excess of visual information, so I resorted to the most primitive technique: a hand-drawn portrait.”
-David Lamelas, October 26, 2006
Many of David Lamelas’ works amplify small moments. These sketched portraits amplify the instant of sitting across from a friend and locking eyes. These interactions mitigated a sense of isolation that Lamelas felt after his return to Los Angeles in 1976, a city that held people distant from one another and removed from intimate association. The portraits are a stark contrast to his wider range of figural works which are primarily captured through photography and presented through both still and motion films.
Lamelas’ hand-drawn visages are further magnified through their inclusion in a collection of slides, projected and precursed by the individual subjects’ names and the cities in which they lived. The distance between friends that Lamelas felt in reality is indirectly expanded upon by his inclusion of geography in these slides. A viewer with any working knowledge of the geography of Southern California can build a sprawling map of the area with Lamelas’ acquaintances plotted across the page.
There is a powerful contrast between the intimate synergy of these forty portraits and the immensity created by the geographical undertones of the piece as well as the artist’s decision to project them. In this way, they playfully interact with his larger theme of exploring a growing cinematic and celebrity culture - elevating his characters, and himself to a status that is larger than life.
Bibliography
“David Lamelas with Hildegarde Duane”, Collection Online, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/david-lamelas-with-hildegarde-duane.
Herrera, Maria Jose, Kristina Newhouse, David Lamelas: A Life of Their Own (Long Beach and Los Angeles, CA: California State University Long Beach Art Museum in association with Getty Publications, 2017), 238-241.
Wall text, Los Angeles Friends (Larger than Life), California State University Long Beach Art Museum, Long Beach, CA.
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