LACMA

Perhaps in Gonzales-Day's aesthetic, incertitude and a nuanced, tentative sense of reality are more highly valued than empirical knowledge. Facticity, then, enjoys little privilege in his art. Indeed, much of his work calls into question the reliability of what has been handed down and received uncritically as historical "fact." But Gonzales-Day also turns the tables, sometimes disguising fact as fiction. In the series Erased Lynchings (2004–6), for instance, he appropriated picture postcards of lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican- Americans in California during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such postcards were produced by amateur photographers and printed for commercial distribution like any other souvenir postcard. As if to prod a guilty conscience of American history, Gonzales-Day digitally erased the victims, leaving the image of a crowd surrounding an impassive void where there had once been a miscarriage of justice. Similarly, in his series Hang Trees (ongoing), he photographed the sites—and in some cases the very tree—where lynchings occurred. Today the settings for these troubling historical occurrences are utterly anonymous, absent of commemora- tion or evidence, even pastoral in appearance. Gonzales-Day assigns himself the task of informing the viewer's knowl- edge, whereby he renders the viewing of these pictures a very unsettling experience. —HOWARD N. FOX Ken Gonzales-Day's art is a sophisticated olio in which history, fiction, documen- tary photography, studio photography, special effects, artifice, and cultural critique all adroitly counterpoint one another. He works in a rich tradition of staged, faux- historical photographs that began in the mid-nineteenth century with O. G. Rejlander's studio-crafted composite photographs and includes such contemporary figures as Eleanor Antin, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Yasumasa Morimura, Gregory Crewdson, and Jeff Wall. These artists often create what might be described as constructed photographs—ones not merely posed or highly arranged, but pictures whose imagery and content are invented specifically to be photographed and may not exist outside of the camera, the darkroom, or the digital master file. Whatever its source, the imagery is manipulated to such a degree that what is presented is, in a very true sense, falsified information. Gonzales-Day strategically misleads and dissembles in his art not with the aim of deluding the viewer—indeed, it is essential that the viewer come to perceive the photographic disinformation—but rather with the goal of enlightening the viewer to realities (his real subject matter) outside of the photograph. Bone Grass Boy (1996), for example, a sort of photonovella set during the Mexican- American War, relates the stories of Ramoncita, an indentured servant, and Nepomuceno, a New Mexican soldier. Gonzales-Day, playing the central characters, staged episodes from the narrative using elaborate costumes and sets and crossing over attributes of nationality, race, and gender—even trespassing through history like a time traveler—in order to engage the fraught history of Mexican-American relations, issues of identity, and the use of artifice to reveal cultural complexities. The series Dysmorphologies (1999–2000), as its title implies, provides a distorted portrait of the human body. Gonzales-Day trained his close-up lens on irregularities of his human subjects—scars, folds of skin, wrinkles, flab—and arranged these details in grids, as if they were laboratory specimens for comparison and analysis. It is difficult to determine whether a specific example might be an aged person's eyelid, the folds of a scrotum, or the back of a hand. Gonzales-Day probes an unset- tling tension between stark recognition and utter indeterminacy, suggesting that certitude—a generalized value in perception and comprehension—is elusive even when documentary evidence is in hand. 160 KEN GONZALES-DAY

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