Galerie Steph is proud to present Profiled, photographer Ken Gonzales-Day’s most recent artistic project. Based in Los Angeles, Gonzales-Day is the Chair of the Art Department and Professor at Scripps College, where he has taught since 1995.
Gonzales-Day has had numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, from Los Angeles to New York and Paris. His work can be found in such collections as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Getty Research Institute, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and Museum National d’Histoire naturelle, Paris among others.
Profiled is an investigation of the depiction of race in sculpture and portrait bust collections. It surveys depictions of the human form as found in some of the most prestigious collections in the United States and Europe, spanning mainly from the eighteenth century until the present day. Yet Profiled is not a history of sculpture: it is a conceptual clustering of cultural artifacts, arranged to foreground the emergence, idealization and even folly of race. Gonzales-Day provides a new context for considering these ambiguous objects, which might otherwise be withheld from public view. The project began with an examination of various forms of racial profiling in contemporary society. Harrowing and flummoxing, these instances of racial discrimination and injustice shed light on the inconsistencies and prejudices inherent in our human consciousness. These concerns echo Gonzales-Day’s concerns on racial discrimination and crimes in his book Lynchings in the West.
As a project, Profiled is about the subjects that busts are modeled after and their inanimate doubles. Cast, carved, burned, and broken, these lingering shadows of people that once lived in this world have been overlooked by many contemporary viewers, many of whom, as noted by the artist, casually ignore the portrait bust collections in museums. The project seeks to reconsider these motionless forms, which represent everything from memorials to emperors to orientalist follies, and suggest news ways of tracking ever-changing ideas about race.
