FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Kristi Engle Gallery
5002 York Ave.
Highland Park, CA 90042
323.472.6237
kristi@kristienglegallery.com

A large part of living in Los Angeles is driving. Each moment behind the wheel, no matter how lullingly familiar, is also fraught with peril. Images and streets are repeated and repeated, yet they constantly call on one to pay close attention.

Photographer, Meg Madison’s Surface Streets, is a sensory re-creation of driving in Los Angeles - fragments of windshields, headlights, tires, blurs of light and reflections on the car’s surface. This work tells the stories of countless city drivers, the daily tedium of familar destinations, the hypnotic repetitiveness of driving tinged with the sensation of the inherent danger of potential collision.

For Madison, a minor traffic accident proved a catalyst for this project. That, and a stockpile of Polaroid SX70 and other out-dated film (digitally enlarged for this exhibition), coupled with the feeling of danger each time she approached her automobile, prompted her to photograph the car each time she got in or out of it during a two-week period in the spring of 2001. While some of the images in Surface Streets evince the physical car, surrounding and protecting the driver, others suggest the world propelled towards the driver as the automobile moves through space. Madison investigates the affinity between the photographic image and the dream-like, disconnected state that city-driving can create.

Meg Madison was born and grew up in New York City. She studied film at San Francisco State and now lives in Los Angeles with her spouse, children and a varying number of dogs.

Kristi Engle Gallery devotes itself primarily to solo exhibitions of new works by contemporary artists in varying mediums. It is located on the downtown Gallery Row, in the Spring Arts Tower.

Kristi Engle Gallery devotes itself primarily to solo exhibitions of new works by contemporary artists. It is located in Highland Park, near the corner of Ave. 50 and York Blvd.