KRISTI ENGLE GALLERY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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

ART EXHIBITION: BERNARD YENELOUIS: “SHELTER”

May 6 through June 17, 2006
Opening Reception: May 6, 2006: 6-9pm
Gallery hours: Thurs - Sat, 12 - 6pm & by appointment
for images, please contact: Kristi Engle, 323/472-6237

Based in New York, photographer Bernard Yenelouis has frequently visited Los Angeles, photographing its mid-century modern domestic architecture. The simplicity & spare design of these homes was a specific and conscious turning away from a former architectural language and a look towards the new & unknown. Yenelouis sees these homes as the “tabula rasa of quotidian reality.”

“Perry Mason,” a murder mystery show which aired from 1957-1966, based several of its plots on the real estate development of Los Angeles in that time period. In one episode originally aired in 1964, an engineer working for a large construction company working on one of the many large housing development projects of the time, in an argument with his superior shouts, “We can't build for tomorrow and worry about yesterday!” This sentiment embodies the attitudes of real estate development projects at the that time and in part the modernist aesthetic.

A rising American affluence was manifested in this mid-century modern architecture. The middle class nuclear family, owning their own free-standing single family home dominated the new Los Angeles landscape. This was intensified by the rise of a new mass media. Cinema, radio, magazines & ultimately television, as well as the car culture of Los Angeles allowed the city to spread out its population & residential areas over larger geographical areas. Technology and wealth turned Americans away from old understandings of community, inspiring a new desire for increased privacy & innovation - new ways of living, new ways of thinking.

Yenelouis uses this historical attitude to inform his art. His work is a kind of spirit photography. The photographs, out of focus, create the sensation that we are seeing and yet not. Buildings that are usually identifiable as Neutras, Schindlers or Lautners are rendered indistinctly - ghostly apparitions, remnants of this historical modernity. Yenelouis presents these photographs as receptacles for longing, loss & time. The subject is frozen in a single moment - one that can never be seen exactly that way again. The photograph inherently attempts to capture that memory and the emotions felt at a particular moment. Yenelouis's photographs are specters of what was, totems of mortality and irrevocable loss.

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.

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