Kristi Engle Gallery,
5002 York Ave.
Highland Park, CA 90042
323.472.6237
kristi@kristienglegallery.com
"Officials today took the rare step of publicly releasing photos of women connected in some way to convicted murderer Bill Bradford, hoping the public might help identify them. While detectives believe some have been murdered, they can't say conclusively and hope publicity might bring witnesses - or the women themselves - forward."
-Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2006
In his first project with Kristi Engle Gallery, artist Michael Arata uses the medium of painting as a process of photographic manipulation. This series of works entitled Remember features 54 small paintings (acrylic on panel), each a portrait of a young woman, hair carefully rendered but with faces blanked out. The hairstyles are all of a kind fashionable in the late 70s and early 80s and place the women in a distinctive place in time. That place tragically coincides with the 1984 arrest and conviction of William Bradford for the murders of two young women in the Los Angeles area.
Posing as a freelance fashion photographer, Bradford persuaded women to model for him, luring them to the Mojave Desert and other desolate locations. Immediately after his arrest, while searching Bradford's apartment, the police discovered a collection of chilling photographs, 54 in total, of pretty young women posing for the camera. With no information that could identify any of the women, all the police could do was wonder who they were and what had happened to them. In 2006, detectives looking through a cold case file found the photographs. Using the web as a way to disseminate the images more widely than was possible at the time, they were published on the LAPD website with a hope of identifying any of the women. These posted photographs became the basis for Arata's project, an exploration of identification and memory through the means of photographic portraiture. Inevitably, the meaning of these photos has shifted since their initial creation and continues to shift following Arata's appropriation and, no doubt, beyond that. Law enforcement posted these photographs in order to individually identify the women, but as a collection, the portraits are also an expression of group classification. The group of people it presents to us today reveals a cultural drive to construct a self image infused with a fear of victimization.
A hairstyle is often a very carefully chosen component of one's own personal identification. Arata's careful rendering of the hair, while blocking out the women's faces, brings into focus individual difference just as it obliterates identity. They are all different and all, somehow, the same. Our knowledge that all of these women are possible victims lends a distinct eeriness to the absence of smiling faces. As the set of photographs consolidates these individual women into a unified group, feelings towards them and their fate as individuals can be kept at arm's length, lessening our personal discomfort. Arata aims to remind us of this cultural habit so that this negation of personal comfort becomes a discomfort in itself. Distinctly aware of the potential missteps this project is fraught with, Arata's aim is to present a sincere memorial to these women in such as way as to critically examine our understanding of the nameless victim as a cultural effect.
Michael Arata has been active in the Los Angeles art community since 1987. His most recent work was exhibited at the San Diego International Art Fair. His work has been shown both locally and internationally.
