Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce “4 Models,” a solo exhibition of new works by artist Brandon Lattu. Lattu utilizes photographic imagery to explore different aspects of perception, at once from a physical, psychological and philosophical perspective. Often employing a particularly precise process of digital manipulation, Lattu composes images that are impossible to see in nature. In his work, perspective is inverted, hidden angles are revealed, opaque and impenetrable surfaces become transparent. As a result, there is an odd “otherworldliness” to much of the work. Ultimately fascination and interpretation are held in simultaneous check, allowing one to revel in the seductiveness of the images but shift back and forth with an analysis of a familiar subject questioned in a pointed way.
For his second solo show at the gallery, Brandon Lattu will be presenting 4 works that each distinctly represent a different model of visual empiricism. The anchor piece of the exhibition is a suite titled Library. With echoes of Fox Talbot’s famous photographs of books from “The Pencil of Nature,” this suite of works depicts covers of all the books in the home of the artist. Bookcases and stacks were initially photographed as they were found. In the finished works, full scale scans of the front, back and spine stand in for the books on a two color ground representing the bookcase and the wall behind. However, the pages of the books are not shown, emphasizing the visual information on the covers of books. Various ideas intersect in this work such as reading vs. seeing, intellectual fetishism, as well as the compulsion of collecting.
Toys of a Two Year Old depicts all of the artist’s two year-old child’s toys that have eyes. The toys are presented on a plain while oval ground arranged from the largest at the center to the smallest at the edge. It is a dizzying array, at once disconcerting and humorous, pondering the visual cues associated with the development of language, and an adult striving for communication with his/her pre-verbal child.
In Untitled Slide Piece, the notational snapshot is the basic compositional unit. Selected from a vast archive of images made over ten years, 160 snapshots are presented as a traditional slide-show with projectors and a dissolve unit. The photographs are ordered so that one subject in each image is repeated in the next. Similar to the film editing technique of a match cut, Lattu’s piece differs in a significant way. Whereas in film editing cuts are planned in advance for narrative progression; this work is made by ordering unrelated experiences into an associative sequence. The piece frustrates narrative expectations, while at the same time suggesting a different model of empirical classification.
Banqueting House is a sculpture produced by the model of perspective of a camera. The titular building in London was designed in 1619-1622 by Inigo Jones in a neo-Palladian style and decorated with ceiling panels by Peter Paul Rubens. Following Vitruvian models of proportion and form the great hall of the building is a double cube: twice as long as it is tall and wide. Lattu photographed the entire interior of the hall from a standing viewpoint in the center of the room, halfway between the entry and the throne. These photographs have been reversed to wrap the exterior of a sculpture that is a hybrid between the double cube and the perspective of the camera.
Brandon Lattu holds an MFA from UCLA. Most recently his work has been included in “The Movement of Images,” at the Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art Paris, “Big City Lab,” curated by Friedrieke Nymphius at Artforum, Berlin, and “Symmetry’ at the MAK Center for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Upcoming solo exhibitions are scheduled at Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver in July and the Kunstverein Bielefeld, Germany in October. He lives in Los Angeles.