LOS ANGELES, CA.-This summer, the Hammer Museum presents three exhibitions featuring two newly commissioned video installations by artists Patty Chang and Fiona Tan as well as The Biographical Landscape of Stephen Shore, 1968-1993, the first U.S. presentation of an extensive selection of photographs by Stephen Shore. Collectively, the exhibitions will allow visitors to explore the work of an established artist whose images of the American landscape brought color photography to high art status in the 1970s alongside the most recent ambitious works by two emerging talents who are moving beyond photography to redefine the use of video in contemporary art today. All three exhibitions will be on view simultaneously through October 16, 2005.

The installations by Patty Chang and Fiona Tan are the first Hammer Museum presentations of works commissioned by the Three M Project, a series of projects jointly developed by and presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, with the purpose of stimulating the creation of new work by artists not yet known in the United States. The third artist in the group of initial commissions is Aernout Mik, whose video installation will be on view at the Hammer Museum in 2006.

PATTY CHANG - Patty Chang: Shangri-La examines the concept of Shangri-La, the mythical hamlet of James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon. The novel and the subsequent 1937 film by Frank Capra propelled the notion of Shangri-La into the collective cultural vocabulary. In 1997, a rural farming town in South Central China near the Tibetan border declared itself the place upon which Shangri-La was based. Subsequently a dozen other towns in the area claimed that they were the real Heaven-On-Earth, resulting in a relentless marketing battle that continued until the Chinese government intervened by officially naming one town Shangri-La. Chang’s Shangri-La is about the reality and fiction inherent in the idea of a place that exists in both real and mythical incarnations. Her work explores the idea of making a real journey to an imaginary place.

The installation centers on a video approximately 30 minutes in length, shot on location in Shangri-La. A number of other elements are installed in an adjacent gallery, most prominently a large sculpture of a mirrored mountain mounted on a rotating platform.

Chang was born in 1972 in San Francisco, California and currently lives in New York City. She received her Bachelors of Arts degree in 1994 from the University of California, San Diego. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain; FRI-ART Centre d’Art Contemporain Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland; and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

Patty Chang: Shangri-La is organized at the Hammer Museum by Russell Ferguson, Chief Curator. The exhibition will debut at the Hammer Museum and will be on view at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (July 8 – September 10, 2005), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (January 28 – May 21, 2006). A fully illustrated, 64-page catalogue featuring essays by Russell Ferguson and Patty Chang accompanies the exhibition.

Patty Chang: Shangri-La is part of The Three M Project—a series by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York to commission, organize and co-present new works of art. Generous support for the series has been provided by the Peter Norton Family Foundation and the American Center Foundation.

Patty Chang received a Media Arts Fellowship, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, for this project.

FIONA TAN - Fiona Tan: Correction is an extensive video installation comprising approximately 300 video portraits of inmates and guards from four U.S. prisons projected on six hanging screens. In Correction, Tan portrays a cross-section of people who inhabit prisons, drawing attention to the multitude of citizens whom society prefers to keep out of sight. Each forty-second portrait features an anonymous inmate or guard standing as still as possible in front of the camera as they are filmed framed from the waist up, a reference to the Amerikanische Einstellung (the American shot) technique used in Hollywood in the 30's, 40's and 50's. Seen on large hanging screens, the images confront the viewer as powerful photographic portraits in motion. The work reveals Tan’s interest in incorporating sociological and anthropological principles into the relationship between the still and moving image.

Tan was born in 1966 in Indonesia and currently resides in the Netherlands. She attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and was a resident artist in 1996-97 at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten Amsterdam. She also received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Scholarship in 2001. Tan’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at international institutions including the De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, the Netherlands; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and in over 50 group exhibitions since 1996.

Fiona Tan: Correction was organized at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), by Francesco Bonami, Manilow Senior Curator, with Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Assistant Curator. The Hammer Museum is its final venue following presentations at the MCA (October 2, 2004 – January 23, 2005) and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (April 9 – June 4, 2005). A 64-page, fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Fiona Tan, Francesco Bonami, Tessa Jackson, founding artistic director of the Artes Mundi Prize, and Joel Snyder, professor at the University of Chicago, accompanies the exhibition.

Fiona Tan: Correction is part of The Three M Project—a series by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York to commission, organize and co-present new works of art. Generous support for the series has been provided by the Peter Norton Family Foundation and the American Center Foundation.

Fiona Tan: Correction also received support from the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, and The Consulate General of The Netherlands in New York. The exhibition catalogue is supported in part by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.

STEPHEN SHORE - The Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968–1993 presents a rare opportunity to study the rich color prints and photographic projects of one of the most prominent and influential American photographers to emerge in the last half-century. The exhibition comprises approximately 120 works from Stephen Shore’s key series, American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, as well as his later landscape photographs. At the heart of the exhibition is Uncommon Places, Shore’s quintessential series on the American vernacular landscape photographed between 1973 and 1982. Many of the works on view have never before been exhibited in the U.S., including original prints, objects from Shore’s earlier conceptual projects, as well as his obsessive daily logs from 1973. The Biographical Landscape illuminates the evolution of Shore’s influential work and gives a full picture of Shore’s articulate and groundbreaking use of large format photography as well as his great contribution to photography in the late 20th century.