Held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art between September 4 and December 18, 2022, the group exhibition "Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising" focuses on the complex relations between fine and applied art in the sphere of publicity. From the early 1970s right up to today, this show traces a genealogy of artists, who work with the tropes of promotional imaging. A broad range of approaches is featured, some critical, some complicit, some ambivalent. Underlying every work on display, however, is a profound sense of affinity. If advertising was invented to sell products we don’t really need, then its ultimate object would have to be art. Yet art must also be sold, and so is implicitly advertising itself. Ultimately, in the words of the curator, Rebecca Morse “these realms blur … We don’t have these structures up anymore that say, ‘this is art and this is an advertisement’ … I think we have abolished these and I think this show shows us that.” In this film, Morse conducts a walkthrough of her exhibition, narrating its origins, conceptual development, and structural realization. Also included are three featured artists – Carter Mull, Kim Schoen, and Jeffrey Stuker – each of whom provides a unique perspective on the exhibition theme.

Rebecca Morse has served as Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, at LACMA since 2013. Prior to that, for a period of 15 years, she was employed as Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She studied both art history and photography as an undergraduate student at State University of New York, Purchase, and then earned her MA in photo history from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Morse credits the years she spent working with photography hands-on, in both the fine art and commercial sectors, as supplying her with the sensitivity to production techniques that undergirds "Objects of Desire."

Carter Mull was born in 1977 in Atlanta Georgia. He received a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2000, and then, transitioning to photography, an MFA from CalArts in 2006. Mull has exhibited in galleries and museums world-wide, and his work can be found in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Institute, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Mull is represented by the gallery Lexicon International in the Cook Islands. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Kim Schoen was born in Princeton in 1969. She received her MFA in Photography in 2005 from CalArts, and an Mphil from The Royal College of Art in 2008. Schoen’s work has been exhibited at MMoCA, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Whitechapel Gallery, South London Gallery, The California Museum of Photography. Schoen is also the co-founder, publisher and editor of MATERIAL, a journal of writing by artists. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Jeffrey Stuker was born in Colorado in 1979. He received an MFA from Yale University, where he also taught critical theory and art from 2006 to 2013. His work was exhibited in the 2020 installment of Made in L.A. and is included in the LACMA collection. He is represented by Ben Hunter Gallery in London. Stuker lives and works in Los Angeles.

Crew Credits –

Production:
Creator and Executive Producer - Hernan Diaz Alonso
Producers - Reza Monahan/William Virgil
Segment Producer/Interviewer - Jan Tumlir
Segment Producer - Caroline Post
Director - Reza Monahan
Director of Photography - Walker Sayen
B Camera - Bailey Galvin-Scott
C Camera - Evan Yee
Swing Tech - Hongwon Suh
Sound Engineer - Chris Trueman

Post-Production:
Story Producer - Jan Tumlir
Editors - Cal Crawford /Reza Monahan

Image Credits:
Installation photographs:
Photos by Sarah Applegate, courtesy of Museum Associates/LACMA

Hashi photographs:
www.hashistudio.com
Copyright © Yasuomi Hashimura All rights reserved.

Jeffrey Stuker:
www.jeffreystuker.com

Kim Schoen:
Auszug aus: Hawaii (23)
www.vimeo.com/472159000

Jackson Pollock:
Photo © Cecil Beaton / Thames & Hudson
www.vogue.com

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother (1936)
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org

Edward Weston, Pepper No. 30 (1930)
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org

Paul Strand, Wall Street (1915)
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org

Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River (1942)
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org

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