Rollout
July 20 – August 31, 2019

OPENING SATURDAY, JULY 20TH, 2019
FROM 6-8 PM

MIER GALLERY
1107 GREENACRE AVE
LOS ANGELES, CA 90046

Rollout comprises photographic, video, and sculptural works created between 2015 and 2018. The title is a play on words referring to the market release of 16mm film, which was introduced in 1923 by the film industry to create a new format by literally splitting 35mm film in half. Lay picks up this fact in the exhibition poster, depicting a roll of film strangely divided in two. Although the ideas and puns behind the works quite literally reveal themselves in each piece, the construction of the image is indecipherable and remains hidden. This break of indexicality negates any form of documentary so often attributed to the photographic medium. Lay instead uses view camera and compositing techniques to propose alternative relations between the objects and actions performed. What we see is not one moment in time—“a moment in the continuum” as John Berger would say—but the result of many invisible decisions and actions of various moments precisely aligned. Hence, time is suspended or compressed.