McClain Gallery is pleased to announce John Waters' first solo exhibition in Texas. In this exhibition the artist's cinematic sensibility and most provocative themes concerning race, sex, gender, consumerism, and religion are transposed into photographs, montages and sculpture.
Waters employs a sly humor when editing film stills snapped from the TV screen into what he refers to as "little movies" - refocusing the intended narrative by condensing words and images to capture his particular artistic vision. In essence redirecting work that is not his own, he sneaks into other movies like a spy to photograph the very details their original directors didn't notice. His approach originated with a desire to retrieve stills from his own movies and developed into an appreciation for the overlooked and misrecalled.
Waters has said, "I'm concerned that people don't remember movies; they remember stills that they've seen over and over in books so I try to photograph things in movies that you are never supposed to see. Really, it's about writing and editing. I think up each of these pieces and then I have to go find the images that make a new narrative which many times is the opposite of or has nothing to do with what the director really began with." In addition to his signature film stills, the exhibition will also feature a number of sculptural/installation works.
John Waters has directed sixteen movies including Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry Baby, Serial Mom and A Dirty Shame. He is a photographer whose work has been shown in galleries all over the world and the author of seven books: Shock Value, Crackpot, Pink Flamingos and Other Trash, Hairspray, Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs, and Art: A Sex Book (co-written with Bruce Hainley). His most recent book Role Models, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May, 2010 appeared on best-seller lists for the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe. Waters is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is on The Wexner Center International Arts Advisory Council. Additionally, he is a past member of the boards of The Andy Warhol Foundation and Printed Matter and was selected as a juror for the 2011 Venice Biennale. Exhibitions include the Swiss Institute, New York, NY, (2009) the Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO (2008), the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1999), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (2004), The Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, and the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2004-2006).