Alex Prager – Matinee

Prager’s work is a visual feast; the more you gaze into the faces of the subjects, the more you wonder, is that even a real person? The truth, representative of the entire exhibition, lies somewhere in the middle. All subjects are clothed in costumes whose timelines don’t quite match. There is an evident visual jumble of time: a 1980s power suit against a 2000s gown in the same image as a man in an Edwardian top hat, Rococo next to gladiator next to medieval knight. In Ceremony, some stare off into oblivion, while others look out of frame to something out of the audience’s view. One man has on fake eyeballs and a woman in the second row viciously side-eyes the lady seated in front of her. The lighting of American West (Rehearsal) shines so brightly on the subjects’ faces, they seem almost mannequin-like. In Bonnie Hill Overlook, the subject wears a Marilyn Monroe-style bouffant, sitting in a glossy red classic car. But the car has modern plates, and the overlook shows a contemporary Los Angeles.

Matinee, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Los Angeles’s beloved ‘showbiz,’ continues Prager’s exploration of the city she was born and raised in. Los Angeles is “both subject and muse,” allowing Prager to display the city as both a place of dreams and a source of underlying anxiety. A strength of the artist’s vision is her ability not to dichotomise beauty and artificiality but to interconnect them. Surreal mannequins sit among a group of humans, colours are vibrant and unrelenting. Prager illustrates that the sheer showiness of it all is perhaps what makes Los Angeles (and her own work) so appealing.