"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." This quote from Shakespeare comes as a perfect description for Alex Prager's latest exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in Hong Kong. The Emmy-winning artist presents her most recent series of photography and film, as well as her first exhibited sculpture at this exhibition.

The Los Angeles-based artist is best known for her theatrical and meticulously staged photographs that created mise en scène by design. Prager has received several major awards for her work, including an Emmy Award for the New York Times-commissioned piece Touch of Evil.

Star Shoes (2017)

Throughout the exhibition, Prager guides the viewer to a predetermined end, using the play with proportion and form to question the assumption that a photograph faithfully represents reality.

Applause (2016)

Radio Hill (2017)

Anaheim (2017)

By varying the dimensions of the photographs to the level of distortion she intends to achieve, Prager uses scale as one of the major formal devices in her works. In Hand Model, a woman's outstretched hand is blown up larger than life, referencing the often unrealistic scaling of cropping of images in advertising. Next to the photograph is a sculpture sticking out from the gallery wall. In this multifold presentation of the same image, the meaning is conveyed in two radically different ways — as the emphasized subject and a trivial detail.

Hand Model (2017)

Contemporary society is awash in visual information that we are presented with versions of reality in marketing, news, and social media, but we rarely pause to consider how our thoughts are guided in the process of looking. Prager's works raise a question on how we contruct most "real world" imagery through our own observations.

Hawkins Street (2017)

See's Candies, Payless, Supercuts 1 (2015)

Alex Prager
Period: 2018/1/18 - 3/17
Venue: Lehmann Maupin
Address: 407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Hong Kong
Admission: Free