Alex Prager

Activity- Read the information, look at the imagery and watch the video above (from the National Gallery of Victoria).

1. Test your comprehension of the video by completing the online quiz below and see if you can score 6 correct answers.

Activity

Art Criticism: Read through this excerpt, from a 2018 review of Alex Prager's exhibition in London:

'To encounter the work of Alex Prager ... is to experience visual culture shock, the dirty realism of monochrome Britain giving way to the hyperrealism of a postmodern America whose most tangible touchstones are filmic: the baroque strangeness of David Lynch, the melodrama of Douglas Sirk, the hallucinatory unease of Hitchcock circa Vertigo and Rear Window....

Silver Lake Drive – a quintessentially Prager title – presents 40 photographs and a retrospective of her films. It begins with the series The Big Valley, in which Hitchcock looms large – one image even shows a stylish woman startled by a flock of predatory birds. This kind of staged, heightened anxiety, unmoored from any context other than cinema, is a constant throughout this mid-career survey. Unlike the Hollywood films it borrows from, it exists purely as a visual trope, undercutting any emotional power the images might otherwise possess. This, of course, may well be intentional.

Prager has undeniably created a signature visual style that is sustained throughout two floors of this deftly curated show. In one enclave, a Lynchian greenlit room beckons the viewer. Once you emerge from it, the gallery seems bathed in a disorienting pinkish glow. Hitchcock, one suspects, would have approved. What lies beneath these meticulously choreographed mises en scene? For me, they depend so much on their photographic and filmic reference points and, as such, seem oddly empty of any deeper emotional resonance. Therein, too, of course, may lie their fascination for a contemporary art world that elevates photography about photography.'

3. Copy and paste the text from the exhibition review above into a digital word document. Note that there are five activities related to question 2.

• Use the highlighter tool to highlight five adjectives used to describe Prager's work in yellow.
• Select three words from your list that you are less familiar with, and type up a definition for those words
• Use the green highlighter tool to indicate words or phrases that are descriptive and which refer to structural frame details, such as the materials, scale, colours, use of light, props, costumes etc.
• Use the pink highlighter tool to indicate areas of the text that reflect the judgement of the critic. This might be positive or negative.

In this text, the critic Sean O'Hagan likens Prager's work to that of American filmmaker David Lynch. Despite this, he makes a specific criticism of Prager's work

• Explain O'Hagan's criticism in your own words and then respond. Do you agree with O'Hagan's comments? Give reasons for your answerType up your response below the annotated text and definitions you have just completed.

When finished, upload your analysis of this art critical writing to your shared digital platform for feedback.