Referencing the heightened drama and saturated colours of classic Hollywood cinema, self-taught Los Angeles-based artist Alex Prager will present her elaborately conceived photographs and films at the National Gallery of Victoriia. The self-titled exhibition is Prager’s first solo show in Australia, and surveys her practice from the Polyester series, 2007, to her most recent body of work, Face in the Crowd, 2013.
Prager’s intensely emotive and technicolour scenes feature a strangely familiar cast of characters; predominantly women, immaculately groomed and wearing wigs, fake eyelashes and adorned in retro fashion, who resemble actors of mid twentieth-century Hollywood. Characterised by the use of constructed sets, dramatic lighting, costumes and actors, and packed with emotion and human melodrama, her work openly references the aesthetics of artists and filmmakers including Alfred Hitchcock, Cindy Sherman…