JOAN'S FIRST SOLO SHOW OF PHOTOGRAPHS PREMIERED AS PART OF THE FIRST ANNUAL HOLLYWOOD WALK OF ART!
This Saturday, Feb. 28 - two landmark events! First, we're thrilled to annouce Joan's first solo photo exhibition 'Feel This', curated by Chivas Clem. For the first time ever, Joan shows her raw, intimate portraits of artists. Secondly, Joan has finally initated her dream of helping to build a walkable Hollywood arts culture.
Combining forces with Chivas Clem and the amazing Bettina Korek (For Your Art) we're proud to announce the first Hollywood Walk of Art!
Join the festivities 11am-6pm and to cap it all off we're holding a reception at The Space from 6-8pm!
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Joan Scheckel is an artist whose career spans 20 years working as writer, director, and and performer both in film and theatre. In this, her first one-woman show of photographs, she has edited down a group of photographs taken during her years developing and refining “The Technique”, which is a revolutionary method of achieving maximum artistic agency through accessing pure unmediated feeling. The photos were born out of her collaboration with her subjects: actors, directors, cinematographers, and artists who came to participate in her workshops. Scheckel’s photographs serve as a record of this new method during which her subjects are tasked with reaching sustained heights of pure feeling on what she refers to as the “empathic freeway”. In this moment her subjects reach a kind of emotional critical mass in which the veil is lifted on the inner life. These feelings, exposed without context, also have the effect of creating an index of mysterious narratives that are never resolved.
As a whole, they are also a kind of diary of Joan’s lifelong interest in authentic feeling as the basis for storytelling and the production of meaning. The images, however, also transcend the “document”-becoming discreet hermetic zones of human expression. The psychic tension in the photos is derived from the delicate balance between “acting” and “authenticity”, a freeze-frame of the convergence between “character” and “self”. The photographs become a metaphor for the visual production of the self and how subjectivity is manufactured. The images explore how essential psychic motions of everyday life are structured through the phenomenon of “acting” which is the seed of a commercialized mythologization machine.
Scheckel’s recent collaboration with Jill Soloway on the award-winning show TRANSPARENT best exemplifies Joan’s method being used in what is perhaps an ideal situation- a highly sensitive director dealing with the complex subject of gender and sexuality. Scheckel’s “Technique” freed the characters to explore how subjectivity is socially parsed into binaries, and how the masquerade of the gendered “self” is in itself a performance. The characters evolution is centered around the realization of the contrived self as it comes to terms with how the “other” is always with us; a reckoning of the inside and the outside as witnessed through a deeply entrenched familial network.
FEEL THIS is a sort of visual manifesto of Scheckel's shepherding a new movement of this sort of filmmaking-the central tenet of which is that storytelling is derived from universal truths as they are played out though the subjective. These photographs, in capturing moments of dramatic urgency, are a meditation on performativity: the slippery place between the self and its performance as it happen under the lens.
For press inquiries please contact Elizabeth Baudoin at 310.780.3491 or Josh Bregman at 323.803.5039
