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Anthony Lepore | Samira Yamin

On View: October 24 – November 17, 2016

Opening Reception: October 24^th from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m.

The Chan Gallery presents an art exhibition featuring works by Anthony Lepore and Samira Yamin, two visiting lecturers in the É«ÖÐÉ« Art Department this fall.

For the past few years, Anthony Lepore has been making photographs in a studio he built inside a working bikini factory. Founded by his grandfather in 1970, the factory is emblematic of the rise and fall of manufacturing in greater Los Angeles. Additionally, it is the site where a uniquely Californian ideal of beauty has been fabricated. Lepore has been making photographs inspired by the gap between that invention and the reality of the working environment. Creating compositions with materials of the site, colorful lycra, spaghetti strap, and tools from the factory floor, Lepore suggests the realization of fantasy and illusion, while staying rooted in a context of the mundane and routine labor that enables such fantasies.

Samira Yamin also pulls from the medium of photography yet hers is a more mediated version of it. In her works, she often cuts intricate patterns from Islamic architecture into war photographs from Time Magazine. She will show a large diptych from the series, Geometries, and a few smaller new works. According to Yamin, Geometries is a series produced by mapping one system of knowledge production, sacred geometries, onto another, TIME Magazine articles about current wars in the Middle East. In Islam, sacred geometries are visual representations of the 99 names of God – The Infinite, The Truth, The Just, The Creator of Order, etcetera, but in this context they also suggest an ornamental, read Orientalist, image of Islam and of the Islamic world. For Yamin the patterns become the gaze that mediates a view and an understanding of not only the war photography in question, but also the wars themselves.

Anthony Lepore grew up in Los Angeles and received his MFA from Yale University and BFA from Fordham University. He has had solo exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside, two Los Angeles contemporary art galleries M+B and Francois Ghebaly, and the Kember Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City in addition to others. His work has been included in several group exhibitions such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, Galerie Xippas in Paris, and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art to highlight a few.

Samira Yamin is an Iranian-American artist who grew up in Los Angeles and received her MFA from UC Irvine and BAs in Studio Art and Sociology from UCLA. She has had a solo exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and has also exhibited at numerous other galleries and institutions such as the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles and the Camera Club of New York. She has also participated in residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Florida, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, CA, and Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA.

Organized by the artists and Tricia Avant