LA><ART

LA><ART is pleased to present a new billboard with Los Angeles-based artist Fay
Ray. Ray's practice explores the process of image-making and reception.
Mobilizing the visual language of commercial advertisement through intricate
collages that juxtapose appropriated images, Ray puts forth provocative
constructs of  social imaginaries of the body and its relationship to consumer
culture. For LA><ART's public billboard, Ray continues an investigation that she
begun years ago in her studio in New York. Ray photographs herself in the studio
nude under dim lighting conditions and then rolls the film back into her camera
to then shoot the various automobiles on display at international car shows.
Superimposing images of auto bodies onto the photographs of herself, the
resulting works attempt to become reflective combinations of flesh and machine,
object and image. An exploration of corporeal and commercial language, Ray's
billboard becomes a layered composition that materializes the psychological
relationship between bodily and consumerist desires.

Accompanying her billboard, LA><ART is launching a limited wallpaper edition by
Fay Ray. Ray's wallpaper edition expands the artists ongoing investigations of
the historical qualities of material culture. Inspired by Ray's interest in the
translatability of materials across contemporary cultural practices, Ray's
wallpaper edition juxtaposes forms associated with retail, fashion,
entertainment, and advertisement to create an emblematic work that reflects on
the interweaving histories that have inspired both designers and artists at
distinct historical moments. At LA><ART, Ray has enveloped the entryway with
this wallpaper through a site-specific installation that extends the dialogue
with her billboard.

Fay ray was born in Riverside, California in 1978. She received her BFA from
Otis College of Art and Design in 2002 and her MFA from Columbia University in
2005. Her work has been exhibited in various institutions including Luckman
Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY; and El Museo del
Barrio, New York, NY amongst others.