July 8 – August 11, 2018
Opening reception: Sunday, July 8, 2018
2:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Hildegarde Duane,
Nancy Drew Goes to Washington, 1981
Original color photograph
The Los Angeles-based conceptual and narrative artist Hildegarde Duane has engaged with the products of mass media entertainment since the mid-nineteen seventies. Now, as then, she selects from among the media's archetypal characters and familiar narrative structures and inventively re-stages them in her own body of video art and photo / text stories. To this end, Duane applies a feminist politics and a slyly subversive sense of humor to her source-material, dramatically changing its original meanings in the process. Indeed, Duane's characteristic strategy of "seizing the media narrative"--shared with her frequent collaborators Ilene Segalove and David Lamelas, and with some of the other young California artists clustered around the video production facilities at the Long Beach Museum of Art in the nineteen seventies--prefigures the art of the Pictures Generation that would soon follow. The exhibition "Hildegarde Duane: Storied," at As Is, includes work recently presented in Western Woman, Duane's critically praised 2017 retrospective at the Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart.