LA JOLLA, CA.- Whale, a new artwork by Nina Katchadourian was installed last week as part of Murals of La Jolla. The mural joins twelve other artworks already installed throughout La Jolla as part of Murals of La Jolla, a project of the La Jolla Community Foundation.

“We are proud to be working with artists of national and international stature” said Matthew Browar, chair of the Murals of La Jolla Art Advisory Committee and a member of the La Jolla Community Foundation Board of Directors. “Murals of La Jolla has been embraced by the community and has attracted an audience from beyond.”

Nina Katchadourian's new work for Murals of La Jolla, located at 1250 Prospect Street, is based on an image of a whale. She worked with the changing sight lines of the wall and careful consideration of scale and image placement to create "an image that would have a very still, low-key, but also strong, steady, and mysterious presence. I wanted to use an image of a whale in a manner that would make it feel a bit like it was hiding, or hidden: one part lurking, one part furtive, one part shy." Katchadourian’s image of a whale is based on a composite photograph by Bryant Austin.

Katchadourian’s diverse practice engages many different media, including sculpture, photography, videography, and sound. Her work often springs from observations and interactions with common, everyday circumstances, resulting in works that have both humor and rigor. One long-running theme in her work deals specifically with the relationship between human and non-human animals, explored in projects like the Mended Spiderwebs series (1998) and the multichannel video installation Zoo, shown at MCASD in 2008.

Katchadourian was born in 1968 in Stanford, California. She received her Bachelor's degree from Brown University and her Master's degree from the University of California, San Diego. For the last seventeen years she has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York. Katchadourian is also on the faculty at NYU. She is represented by Catharine Clark gallery in San Francisco.

Murals of La Jolla was conceived in 2010 by the La Jolla Community Foundation as a means to enhance the civic character of the community by commissioning public art projects on private property throughout La Jolla. An Art Advisory Committee - composed of the heads of the major visual arts organizations in La Jolla - commissions artists to propose the intervention of an image on specific walls on privately owned buildings. The first two artworks by Roy McMakin and Kim MacConnel were painted directly on their sites. Subsequent artworks have been printed on vinyl and installed on billboard-like structures. Each work is on view for a minimum of two years and has been generously funded by private donations to the La Jolla Community Foundation, a proud affiliate of The San Diego Foundation.

“The Murals of La Jolla has established the La Jolla Community Foundation as an important and impactful institution in our community,” said Phyllis Pfeiffer, chair of the La Jolla Community Foundation. “More than 100 individuals, families, and businesses have made donations to support the murals and to become members of the foundation. We are working together to preserve and enhance La Jolla for future generations.”

To date, works by John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Gajin Fujita, Anya Gallaccio, Robert Ginder, Ann Hamilton, Robert Irwin & Philipp Scholz Rittermann, Kim MacConnel, Ryan McGinness, Roy McMakin, Richard Allen Morris, Julian Opie and Fred Tomaselli have been installed throughout La Jolla.