Anthony Lepore

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Time’s a Taker, an exhibition of new photographic works by Los Angeles-based artist Anthony Lepore. This exhibition is the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery.

Time is a patient revealer, separating the finished from the uncharted. Clocks remind us of the future, and the camera, a sly thief, collects everything behind us. In Anthony Lepore’s Time’s a Taker, artworks become accounts of their own making in elegiac stirrings of memory, objecthood, and decay. Lepore’s works hang like stopped clocks on the wall, object and memory fused. Constructed from wood and photographs, the structures create space for these not-so-still lives to celebrate and mourn transformation. Illusion, one of photography’s oldest and most fraught traditions, is subverted, with trickery quickly ceding to generosity. Lepore’s objects unfold in moments of uneasy laughter and knowing precarity, a product of combining the temporality inherent to photography with sculpture’s timeless aspirations.

In I Yield My Time, for example, Lepore examines the short-lived lives of several generations of popsicles in the summer heat, their icy individual forms surrendering into communal pools of sweetness. Nothing Burns Forever finds the artist reversing fire’s crucial ephemerality to surreal and biblical effect. The object’s would-be interior predictably burns, while its automotive paint-clad housing gleams, unscathed. Curling flames appear see-through, observed in daylight, and contained within the box’s structure as opposed to consuming it. Both fictions point to a larger conceit in Lepore’s work, that visual poetry and meaning spring from the union of captured image and invented truth.

Our sensitivity to time and its progress is intimately linked to the camera’s ability to capture our past at varying distances, allowing us to peer through a door we can no longer enter. Lepore’s work blurs this passivity inherent in the stilled image. In Keeping It Together, a garden hose loses control in a celebration of discontinuity and chaotic release. We want to run and plug the bucking nozzle, but must settle with observing wet chaos. In contrast, gravity slowly reassembles mounds of sand from one space to the next in Days of our Lives, with precisely measured disbursement. Lepore plays with our expectations of photography’s promised immediacy–the works in Time’s a Taker are not static documents, but continually resonant testaments to once-present moments, with the viewer constantly reminded of the past and future surrounding each one. A popsicle only melts once, but the stain lasts forever.

Anthony Lepore (b. 1977, Burbank, CA) received his BFA from Fordham University in 2000 and his MFA from Yale University in 2005. His works have been the subject of exhibitions internationally, and are held in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, Missouri) and Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Connecticut), among others.