American Beauty (a Trump l'oeil)

About

Lumen is proud to have been selected by the Barbican Centre to bring exciting new art to its public spaces. Our first collaboration, the commission of American Beauty (a Trump L’oeil), by 2016 Lumen Prize finalist Rachel Ara with Kay Le Seelleur Ara, is part of the Barbican’s 2018 season, ‘The Art of Change’, which explores how artists respond to, reflect on and can potentially effect change in the social and political landscape.

American Beauty (a Trump L’oeil) uses film, poetry, humour and CGI to create an incongruous image that references film history, utopian architecture and contemporary politics. The iconic brutalist architecture of the Barbican becomes a glitch, a window through which we might catch a glimpse into our future. Visitors watch as an orange hairpiece dances in the wind in perpetuity around the Barbican Estate, echoing the iconic scene from Sam Mendes’s American Beauty. The title itself is a play on the phrase trompe l’oeil (deceives the eye).

Rachel Ara is a conceptual artist whose cross-disciplinary practice is non-conformist with a socio-political edge, often incorporating humour and technology with feminist concerns. A 2016 Lumen Prize finalist in the Still Image category, this year Ara was recently selected for the London Open at the Whitechapel Gallery and is currently artist-in-residence at the V&A.

Her work was selected from a shortlist of winners and finalists from the Lumen Prize for Digital Art in collaboration with the Barbican Centre’s Level G programme. Last year, Zarah Hussain’s Numina, which also formed part of the Barbican’s Level G programme, won the Lumen Prize People’s Choice award – determined by a public vote of the Lumen longlist.

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/series/level-g