Charlie White: Everything is American

18 January - 25 February 2006 

This January, f a projects is pleased to announce the first show in the UK of Los – Angeles based artist, Charlie White

Everything is American is a photographic series which re-creates and re-imagines iconic moments from history and myth to construct a revised history of human violence.

From the gaze of a young Susan Atkins standing trial for the Tate-La Bianca murders, to the martyr-like pathos of an injured United States gymnast, the portraits in White’s new series create an arresting tension between the fictional and the recognisable. In these photographs no image is truly innocent; even at their most anonymous and lyrical, each subject in the series bears the overtones of a narrative that is inescapably American.

As White’s first extended exploration of portraiture, this series is a departure from his more grandly conceived photographic scenarios. The intimate focus of these seven images offers a provoking meditation on the interplay between historical characters, fictional personae and classical subjects.

There is little bloodletting portrayed in these images, and none actually enacted, yet violence pervades the series. Whatever their own innate brutality, the subjects represented in White’s portraits are also shown to be victims, unable to free themselves of a pervasive national mythology.

Everything is American, will be shown concurrently at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York and f a projects London.

Charlie White is Assistant Professor and Member of the MFA faculty in the School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California. He graduated from the Fine Arts programme at the School of Visual Arts, New York and the Graduate programme at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Recent exhibitions include ‘Otherwise: Phantastic Art’, Oberösterreichische Landesmuseen, Linz, Austria; Norton Museum of Art, Florida; ‘I Feel Mysterious’, Palm Beach Institute for Contemporary Art. Upcoming exhibitions include ‘Dark Palaces’, Santa Monica Museum of Art, California.