“MY PROJECTS usually come from a very personal place, a place with a mix of emotions, a place of love, fear, and isolation,” are Alex Prager’s introductory comments as you walk through her first solo exhibition at the Lotte Museum of Art in Seoul. In her showcase titled “Big West,” Prager walks the audience through nearly 100 photographed still and moving shots that capture her experiences as a photographer and director in the Hollywood industry.

Los Angeles: Prager’s city of inspiration

   Born in Silver Lake, Los Angeles (LA) during the early 1980s—Alex Prager was familiarized with the iconic pop-culture references of the Hollywood industry at an early age. Her strange infatuation with the city of LA becomes quite clear in her early works from 2007 to 2013, such as Polyester and The Big Valley, displayed in the first two rooms of the exhibition. Addressing her heavy focus on LA as a primary location in her photographs, Prager explained that LA had the “Big West quality.” Due to its close connections with Hollywood, everything creative was “possible” with a “blank canvas” in LA.

   Besides LA itself, ArtKey[1] attributes photographer William Eggleston as a major influence on Prager’s works. Eggleston’s captivating technicolor photographs inspired Prager to interpret LA's “blank canvas” as a mise-en-scene[2] stage with shiny neon signs and bold red lipsticks in her works. Interestingly, around this time, Prager also acquired the brightly colored wigs of the 1960s from her grandmother’s friend—a former Hollywood celebrity—which inspired the glamorous Hollywood retro style in her art pieces.

De-glamorizing Hollywood movie scenes

   In her early works, Prager was eager to produce nostalgic yet critical interpretations of iconic stores and “glamorous” Hollywood movies scenes set in LA. One of her most striking pieces is Ellen from the Polyester collection, which stars a teenage girl in heavily streaked makeup as she gazes soullessly away from the vintage yellow camera lens. As her frail hands hold an unnaturally large soda cup, the viewers cannot help but pity the girl’s clear discomfort in her heavily dolled eyeliner and rough blond braids when she tries to appear more glamorous and adult-like. Ellen’s unblended makeup and almost nervous gait is Prager’s signature technique of making her character appear almost painfully ordinary so that the audience relates to them.

   Another piece from Polyester is Crystal, featuring a young woman presumably sunbathing on her stomach as she enjoys the summer in LA. The actress in the photo pays homage to the glamorous beach scenes in Hollywood movies of beautiful, statuesque bikini-clad women but with a greater hint of authenticity. Instead of having a heavily oiled backside, there are tan lines on the woman’s back and the soles of her feet are dirty with sand. Less intuitively, a graver observation is available for the viewers: the dark-colored bottle of gin set against the contrast of the bright yellow mat. In such a carefree beach setting, Crystal’s bottle of gin seems to hint at the dark coping mechanisms, such as alcoholism, a glamorous life may lead you to.

   Such coping mechanisms are also manifested in the form of loneliness portrayed in Prager’s classic work, Susie and Friends where the central actress, Susie, sits in murky green pool water with all of her five friends staring almost greedily at Susie’s cigarette in her mouth. In an interview with The Yonsei Annals, curator Cheong Hye-in explains that Susie’s head turn—a symbolic moment of vulnerability—is actually the time when her faux friends start showing their true emotions. At the right corner, the viewer can see a friend set in an unflattering dark shadow showing a hint of rivalry or loneliness with Susie. Thus, the viewers can easily relate to this miserable feeling of being isolated in a shallow social circle in the romanticized “glamorous” pool parties in Western movies.

No one cares in this disconnected crowd

   After the purposeful depiction of un-glamorous characters in Prager’s early works, the themes in the latter half of the exhibition emphasize this indifference of crowds. One of her pieces, Speed Limit, expertly criticizes this disconnection. Inspired by the opening scenes of the Academy Award winning movie, La La land, Prager portrays a car accident happening mid-air. Despite the almost precarious positioning of the car, the street passersby seem to coolly walk away.

   This indifference to tragedy is given a more layered dilemma in Compulsion, where Prager positions a single tearful eye next to a photo of a house burning or people drowning. According to ArtKey, the distressed eye is the single caring voyeur, who does feel the loss of the affected person from the tragedy. However, by gazing into such an intimate moment of tragedy, this voyeuristic eye is also invading the privacy of the person suffering from loss, suggesting that conscientious respect for a person’s privacy might be why people are becoming more disconnected.

   An extreme case of disconnect is aptly portrayed in the short motion picture, Le Grande Sortie, set in Opera Bastille, where the ballerina is desperately trying to catch the attention of her bored and distrustful audience. The ballerina’s need to engage her uncaring viewers is so great that she decides to dance with one of the formidable women in the audience instead of her male ballet partner. By portraying the ballerina’s extreme dependence on her audience, Prager seems to be lamenting the disconnection between audiences and the artist.

A surreal experience

   After moving from Le Grande Sortie, Prager attempts to reconnect the audience with surreal photos of flight attendants and party attendees hanging mid-air in her recent Part One: The Mountain series. Cheong mentioned that this series was designed to embody the unexpected COVID-19 situation, which explains the sudden disorienting effect on the viewer as they gaze at the hyper-realistic texture of the fabric on the characters in the photos who are otherwise stranded in an unrealistic situation.

   Prager’s interest in portraying this rather “hybrid reality” is heavily inspired by surrealist photographers like Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, who were known for “manipulating human body images.” Prager’s 2014 work titled Parts is a classic ode to Ray and Tabard. Starring actress Julia Garner from the hit Netflix series, Inventing Anna, Parts showcases holed cut-outs of Garner’s nose, hands, and face. Set against an unnervingly realistic background of Garner’s skin-tone, the picture at once reminds viewers of a vintage makeup advertisement and the holes of a guillotine—two surrealistically contrasting images.

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   The concluding section in the “Big West” exhibition is Applause which has four wall-sized projections of the actors endlessly clapping at the audience in a loop. According to Cheong, Applause has been a crowd favorite by the Seoul audience because it positions the viewers in an acting role. Through this immersive experience, Cheong explained that Prager wanted to connect the audience with her art by showing that any person—no matter how ordinary—can be the main character in a movie called life.

Period: February 28 to June 6, 2022

Entry Hours: 10:30 to 19:00 (Last entry, 18:30)

Admission Fee: Adults \15000

Address: Lotte World Tower, 300, Olympic-ro, Songpa-gu, Seoul.

[1] ArtKey: An app with audio commentary of Alex Prager’s exhibition.

[2] Mise-en-scene: Make the stage look as if it was from the 1950s or 1960s.