6 - 9 December, 2012
Booth P03

On the occasion of Art Basel Miami Beach 2012, Galerie Michel Rein is pleased to present a solo exhibition by LaToya Ruby Frazier. The photographs shown in this exhibition cover two bodies of works that revolve around the artist’s hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania. With the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s, Braddock entered a long and ongoing period of economic crisis.

The “Grey Area” series (2011) is a one-year study and documentation of the demolition of Braddock Hospital by a healthcare corporation (U.P.M.C.), destroying even more jobs and making access to care difficult for residents of one of the most polluted cities in the United States. Yet they simultaneously built a 250-million-dollar new hospital in the neighboring cit y, which already had two major hospitals. A “grey area” is a highly contested term to use when it can not be determined if something is right or wrong.

"The Notion of Family" (2002–), perhaps Frazier’s best-known work to date, is an ongoing series of black-and-white photographs documenting the artist’s family, one of the many that has borne the brunt of the town’s social, economic, and environmental decline. Some of these images were exhibited at the 2012 Whitney Biennial in New York.

Between intimate photography and social documentary, LaToya Ruby Frazier reports the decline of this once-prosperous steel-producing town, where poverty, unemployment and health problems relating to pollution have largely devastated the local population. From the outset of her career, LaToya Ruby Frazier has moved freely between photography, video and performance. This way of exploring the image while conceiving different ways of getting her pictures allows her to escape the limits of documentary photography and to arrange other forms in order to transpose ordinary speech and ensure that other voices are heard.

LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982; she lives and works between New Brunswick, New Jersey; Braddock, and New York City. Her work has been shown in a solo show at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012 and in numerous group exhibitions that include the 2012 Whitney Museum Biennial; the 2011 Incheon Korea Biennale; the Andy Warhol Museum Biennial, 2011; PS1 MoMA: Greater New York, 2010; and the New Museum Triennial, 2009.

Her upcoming projects in 2013 include solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and t he Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Her work is now included in museum and foundation collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Kadist Foundation, Paris; and the Brooklyn Museum.