Claudia Bitran: White Shoes

On view August 3rd – September 1stOpening Reception: First Friday, August 3rd, 6 pm – 10 pm 

Practice Gallery, Philadelphia, is pleased to present White Shoes, a solo exhibition by Claudia Bitran.

Undertaking a field study of the way bodies look when generating social media content, Bitran began photographing teenagers as they posed for one another in tourist areas of New York City. The results of this study raised a number of questions, such as: How has social media changed these teenagers’ experience of place? How has it changed the way they represent their bodies to themselves and to one another? And, most urgently: Why are they all wearing white shoes?

This interactive installation presents a room full of freestanding life-size paintings based on photographs from Bitran’s field study. Flipped to be installed upside-down, the figures provide spectators with an eye-level view of their clean white shoes.

Like much of Bitran’s work, White Shoes stands somewhere between critique and devotional act, exploring the contradictory and seductive powers of capitalism by engaging and complicating the smooth transmission of its signs.

Claudia Bitran is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily in video and painting. She was born in Boston, spent most of her life in Chile, and currently lives in New York City. Bitran holds a BFA from the Universidad Catolica de Chile (2009), and an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2013). She has held residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska, the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program in New Mexico, and the Smack Mellon Studio Program in New York, and is currently in residence at Outpost Projects in Brooklyn.