Western Movie

William Leavitt’s recent landscape paintings in acrylic and vinyl will open at galerie frank elbaz on March 17, 2018. Using his own photographs as backgrounds for these montage scenes, he manipulates the images in Photoshop in order to create complicated spaces, and provide settings for the array of coded and symbolic objects that inhabit them. These elements, plus some sourced from the web and print, are chosen for their juxtaposition and emotional resonance. The ensemble of scenes make for an undefined cinematic narrative.

 Also as part of the exhibition there will be a video installation of a set-like fragment of a domestic interior, consisting of a patio door opening with vertical blinds, and a projection of figures walking through a birch forest.

‘‘Leavitt’s paintings are worlds layered upon worlds, each themselves suggestive of an uncanny science fiction surrealism met with Southern California banality. The artist who, through his career, has destabilized the medium and location of his works, often by displaying sets from film or theater pieces as sculptural installations. The result is that the works project multiple perspectives – as an array of objects in physical space, a suggested narrative playing out in the viewer’s mind, and a working set in a film’’. -Gene McHugh-

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