LOS ANGELES, CA.- Regen Projects presents an exhibition of works by New York artist, Marilyn Minter. For her debut at Regen Projects, Minter presents a series of decadent paintings, photographs and her new film Green Pink Caviar. On view at Regen Projects II is a series the artist categorizes as the "Mouth Series", where tongues and lips lick, suck and drool candylike substances. These works implicate the viewer as a voyeur in Minter's unattainable fantasy. As mouths push lusciously colored materials up against glass, the glass becomes a screen and the viewer, the object these mouths defiantly drive up against. The velocity of this movement is the ultimate jouissance blurring the boundary between pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion. Throughout Minter's oeuvre, the artist seeks to imbue our fantasies with reality, showing the viewer that the human condition itself does not permit perfection and the notion of the ideal is impossible to obtain.
Also on view at Regen Projects II are paintings and photographs from the "Pam Series" in which Pamela Anderson is the subject. Originally a project commissioned for Parkett Magazine, the artist works to obscure the distinction between art and advertising, using the language of both mediums to create a vocabulary that is her own. Portrayed in her natural state, the actress is depicted in an unconventional way. In Minter's works she is both vulnerable and glamorous. Evoking commercially sexualized depictions of femininity, Minter investigates the possibilities and limitations of photography through a lens of beauty.
Minter's film "Green Pink Caviar", will be on view at Regen Projects as well as two moving image billboards on Sunset Boulevard that will play the film once an hour for the duration of the exhibition. Drawing upon the same subject matter depicted in the "Mouth Series", the video simulates painting with the tongue. Slurping and squirting these fluids become abject liquids, both visceral and foreign. Curator Joshua Shrikey writes:
"Minter shows us unruly bodies that cannot fit within our culture's carefully drawn lines: greedy, excessive bodies that ooze and leak and are marked by too much sweat, too much makeup, too much hair, too much grime. These works are about our private ruminations and self-scrutiny; they reveal bodies that, compared to the fantasies that bombard us daily, seem to be in a state of constant eruption."
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Minter has been the subject of numerous museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide. She was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and featured on a series of billboards throughout New York City in conjunction with the exhibition. Her work is the subject of current solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio and The Cannery in Murcia, Spain.