Outset Netherlands was delighted to have supported the exhibition Happy Valley by Eva O’Leary at Foam Photography Museum as a result of awarding her with the Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund.
The Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund was a unique partnership between Unseen Photo Fair, Foam and Outset Netherlands, providing a new institutional platform for emerging talent. Scouting the fair before opening hours, each year the curatorial committee selects one artist exhibiting at Unseen for a solo exhibition the following year at Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam. This year the committee consisted out of Melanie Bühler, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, Rodrigo Orrantia, Art Historian and Curator, specialised in photography, Creative Director of Champion Photobooks in London and Marina Paulenka, Artistic Director at Organ Vida in Zagreb.
Happy Valley is the nickname for the town State College in Pennsylvania (US), the hometown of American-Irish artist Eva O’Leary (1989). On the surface, it appears to be a tranquil and quiet place; the home of Penn State University and its popular football team, The Penn State Nittany Lions. It is a football town that was once an icon of white, middle-class Americana but is now best known for an international sex scandal. The artist left Happy Valley at the age of 18, but the place has continued to haunt her work since. At first sight, this work seems to be a crisp and colourful portrait of an American town and its inhabitants. However, the almost violent acuity of the images simultaneously evokes a deep sense of unease.
The work comments on the artist’s personal experience of growing up in a constructed and transient place, where the population rejuvenates with the beginning of every college term, and the cycle starts anew. Adolescent girls and boys sense the pressure to conform to ideas of masculinity, femininity and unattainable beauty standards. Suffocating gender-normativity is elaborately reiterated via social media channels and in the culture around them. Groomed, airbrushed and saturated, these photographs foster a collective (almost ritualistic) make-belief the artist calls ‘American mythology’. The seductive visual language of O’Leary references that of slick social media feeds and commercial advertisements. However, her use of a large-format camera results in images with an unforgiving level of detail, revealing subtle flaws and nigh-imperceptible cracks in the façade.
ON VIEW: 1st March – 28th April, 2019
