Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive

The Fondazione Sozzani presents for the first time in Italy the exhibition “Silver Lake Drive”, in which Alex Prager unites ten years of her photographic and film works.
The exhibition is curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of the Musée des beaux-arts Le Locle, Switzerland.
Prager’s work is cinematic, drawing inspiration from her surroundings, personal experiences, street photography, pop culture and film. She utilizes a range of style elements reminiscent of early film genres such as film noir, thriller, melodrama and crime fiction. Women have frequently been the protagonist in Prager’s work, driven by emotion.
Through the use of saturated colours and familiar imagery, Prager is able to create her own unique world where she explores darker topics in a seductive and unsettling way.
Prager’s work is rooted in the photographic tradition of William Eggleston, Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman, each of whom mastered the art of freezing the indeterminable everyday moment. Prager’s oeuvre consists of heavily staged, large format images using rich colours. Her photographs can be seen as ‘single frame narratives’ that capture
enigmatic stories within the edges of the frame. Both her photographs and films are characterised by the absence of a linear narrative.
Prager’s native city of Los Angeles serves as both a source of inspiration and the backdrop to many of her series, such as Polyester (2007), Week-end (2010) and Compulsion (2012). Although the images appear to be capturing fleeting moments, they are preceded by a laborious production process. For her film Face in the Crowd (2013), for example, Prager had a team of more than 150 people at her disposal, in addition to 350 extras and a collection of props that the artist amassed over a period of 12 years.
Prager’s film, La Grande Sortie, consists of photographs and film images shot against the backdrop of the Opera Bastille in Paris. The series leads the viewer on a journey through the emotions that a prima ballerina (Émilie Cozette) experiences during her dance performance – ranging from stoicism to sheer panic. The film is a homage to the equally banal and fantastical hyper reality that is inherent to film and theatre.