Paradise: Kutlug Ataman

Paradise is a full color catalogue featuring photos of the interviewees taken on location by Ataman and essays by OCMA Curator of Contemporary Art Aimee Chang, cultural critic and urban historian Norman Klein, and critical theorist and art historian Irit Rogoff. The catalog was underwritten by Jennifer McSweeney. With the international popularity of TV shows such as The O.C., The Real Housewives of Orange County, and Laguna Beach, Orange County has come to represent a certain kind of paradise in the minds of millions of people who have never been here. In response to this phenomenon, Kutlug Ataman s new multi-channel video installation, Paradise, premiering at OCMA, explores the construction of both the myth and the reality of Southern California. Filmed in a wide-screen format suggestive of Hollywood films, the piece combines video interviews with twenty-four typical and a typical residents of Southern California, from star and car obsessed youth to an Emmy award winning producer who volunteers as a character in Pageant of the Masters, Laguna Beach s famous yearly festival featuring tableaux vivant. Local members of the laughter yoga club are present as is one of Southern California s most famous chroniclers of the apocalypse, Mike Davis. Dr. Robert Anthony Schuller, the 1960s founder of the drive-in church and commissioner of one of the seven wonders of Orange County, the Philip Johnson designed Crystal Cathedral, contributes his thoughts on paradise. Other members of this ad hoc community include a thanathologist, the owner of a Southern California medi-spa, the famous futurist william Knoke, and a leader of the Minutemen in San Diego. According to Ataman talking is the only meaningful activity we are capable of. In keeping with this, Ataman s new work explores how individuals construct themselves within the play of paradise and how they engineer and construct paradise through their narratives.