Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present Katy Grannan: Mad River, an exhibition of new photographs made in Northern California’s Humboldt County, where Grannan has recently been living and working. In the ongoing portrait series, on view for the first time, Grannan depicts subjects who reflect the independent spirit of an area known for the privacy and seclusion it offers. Often building relationships with her subjects, Grannan explores the connections between self-presentation and place, creating a kind of collaborative fiction. This will be the gallery’s sixth exhibition of Grannan’s work since 2006. The gallery will hold a public reception with the artist on Saturday, September 13, from 2-4pm, concurrent with the reception for Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited.
Densely forested and largely rural, Humboldt County has been called a place where people go to disappear. Grannan first came to the area in 2023 and began photographing people she met through methods she knew, using Craigslist ads and fliers posted on local bulletin boards to find models. Her subjects are eager to be seen, and to collaborate with Grannan for reasons as varied as the individuals themselves: an autistic teenager, a circus performer, an actress, a queer farmer, a man and his goat. Over time, Grannan’s network has expanded as subjects refer friends and roommates, offering a cross-section of a particular community. In a place that has long attracted nonconformists of different types, many of the people Grannan photographed are part of the area’s different creative circles, and many identify as genderqueer.
Grannan made her first portraits more than twenty years ago, in series such as Poughkeepsie Journal and Sugar Camp Road, where she found subjects through newspaper ads. Since then, social media and ubiquitous digital cameras have reshaped the experience of being photographed, and Grannan’s subjects today innately understand how they appear to her camera. In these photographs, Grannan focuses on ambiguous gestures, capturing the spaces between poses. Several images are set in a studio with bright red carpet, where subjects flirt with the language of fashion photography while subverting its rules. Others are set at the beach, in a forest, and in the shallow water of the Mad River. In a place known for its magnificent redwoods and dramatic coastline, the landscape is quiet in Grannan’s images, leaving the focus on people while revealing the outlines of the place that shapes them.
