2009 Exhibitions Florencia Levy Commute Portraits
2009 Curated and essay by Cynthia Mulcahy
Centraltrak Artist Residency, Dallas, Texas
www.centraltrak.com
French poet Charles Baudelaire described the nineteenth-century
flaneur, an observer of social life in the city, as a "botanist of the
sidewalk." Admittedly,
artist Florencia Levy might
also be described in like manner for her empirical investigations of
contemporary everyday life in her own city of Buenos Aires.
The recent project Local Tourism began when the artist informed friends and family she was leaving on vacation for a month or so, the putative assumption
being, of course, that she was elsewhere in another city. Rather, the
artist sojourned in her own city, staying at a succession of cheap
hotels near the city
center, a different one every night. She frequented local landmarks,
mailed postcards to loved ones, and recorded her daily observations.
The result was a
video work and series of photographs of poetic narrative and conceptual force.
Another recent body of work was based on the artist assuming the role
of an interested tenant and visiting tens of dozens of empty apartments
for rent in her
city.
She has also made audio guides of city bus routes in Argentina that one
can follow. Accident introduced her to Mr. Torres, a Peruvian immigrant
fabric
cutter in Buenos
Aires, and his window stuffed plant collection growing in soil smuggled
from his native country. The artist told his story through text and
images
and handed out a
thousand flyers to the serried crowds crossing on the corner streets of
Senor Torres’ garment district studio.
In Commute Portraits, her latest exhibition, Levy, while in residence as an artist at Centraltrak in Dallas, Texas, accompanied commuters on their daily walks,
drives, or public transport commutes – be they cowboy farriers, fellow
artists or recent immigrants from Mexico. Through video, installation,
photographs, water-
colors, text and objects, which include cut Oleander flowers, a neon
Pitt Grill sign, a tiny viewfinder and a model airplane, Levy captures
what nineteenth-century
journalist Victor Fournel in writing about the artist-as-explorer
referred to as "the confessions, antipathies and admirations of the
crowd.”
In all these
works, it’s less about Levy’s experiences than it is about what people
and place reveal. The artist unspools these revelations and reworks
them, often
in adumbrated form such as the video work The Master Farrier, part one which counterpoints fact and fiction, myth and reality, in a deadpan and hilarious
morality play.
- Curator Cynthia Mulcahy 
Birth of Surf: The 1960s and 1970s Documentary Photography
of LeRoy Grannis
American Institute of Architects / Dallas Center for Architecture
1909 Woodall Rodgers
Frwy., Suite100, Dallas, TX 75201
Curated by Cynthia Mulcahy For more information:
http://www.dallascfa.com
In the early 1960s in Hermosa Beach, California, surfer and
amateur photographer LeRoy Grannis began documenting
the burgeoning surfing scene along
the
Southern California coast. In retrospect what he captured were surfing’s
golden
years and the evolution from a DIY culture
of
surfers making their own boards, surf zines and films to mainstream
media’s
adoption of a
new American heroic
figure: the surf
god. With his pluck and cool insouciance, the surfer defined the new
modern
archetype and
Hollywood and the advertising
industry fell hard, producing big-budget films and using
iconic surf
imagery to
help sell cars, vacations,
and
fashions to a nation of new mass consumers.
LeRoy
Grannis recorded with his camera
lens the entire surfing lifestyle in California and Hawaii in the 1960s and
1970s:
the tanned surfers, the beach crowds, the surf fashions, the
skaters, the surf contests, the surf graphics, even the cars, the
architecture, and the landscape. As a co-founder of Surfing International and later
as photo editor of Surfing IIlustrated, Grannis
became one of the most important documentarians of his time, capturing an era and a
lifestyle that defined a shifting American
identity
in the modern period of the 20th century: a halcyon time
between the Beat Generation of the late 50s and the yet to be
formed Hippie counter-culture of the late 60s and early 70s.
1960s and 1970s Ford, American Express, Coppertone and Pan Am advertisements
Leroy Grannis: Surf Photography of the 1960s and 1970s
Taschen's
recently published monograph of LeRoy
Grannis' documentary photography
Selected Past Exhibitions 1994 - 2007 Nate Cassie
Put the needle on the record: meditations on work, community and progress 
Margaret Meehan
Pity Party on the Mountain of Loneliness 
Charlie Morris
Operations 
Rosalyn Bodycomb
Nocturnes 
Meg Langhorne exhibitions
Nod and
Witness 
Celia Eberle
Theogony
Marcel Gautherot's 20th century documentary photography of Oscar Niemeyer's
Brasilia
Brazilian Graffiti collective
Fleshbeck Crew 
Introduction:06 Heyd Fontenot (below), Victoria Montelongo and
Michael Warren
Introduction: 07 Margaret Meehan, Jonathan Marshall and Eric
Zimmerman
Monica Pierce
New Works on Paper
Robert Hamilton
Mindy Kober
Derrick Saunders
