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Jul 8, 2024 · Leavitt, who moved to Los Angeles in 1965, looks at the popular culture and modernist architecture of the city to create works that suggest narrattives and what he calls, “the theater of the ordinary.” His works reflect the particular fusion of illusion and reality of Hollywood.
Sep 3, 2019 · View Gallery 5 Images. Starting from a busy street in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, brick steps wind up a hill thick with trees and shrubs. The house William Leavitt (b. 1941)...
- Annette Leddy
See all works by William Leavitt. Enamored of the artifice of Hollywood sets, William Leavitt has used the tricks and tropes of professional set design and the visual language of cinema to look at how context, objects, and editing influence our understanding of narrative.
Mar 13, 2021 · Though the artist has frequently utilized the innate theatricality of a gallery setting - “My early installations were like fragments of stage sets…sort of like sculptures where I used trees and lights and sound.” – in this exhibition Leavitt confines the nature of his experimentation to his images.
Despite Leavitt's long history of exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and abroad, the Theater Objects retrospective was described as "a revelation" by art critic Christopher Knight. [7] Leavitt is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.
Through his installations and videos, drawings and paintings, play and sound performances, Leavitt re-examines the production of the Western imaginary, as imposed, since the end of World War II, by the “Hollywood factory.”
In the artist’s set-like installations, images of the California lifestyle come untethered from their original context and take on a sculptural presence. Garden Sound consists of artificial plants, a plywood box, circulating water, a microphone, an amplifier and a speaker.
