Some Las Vegas Stripclubs

What is it about the scale, sites, and sounds of the open road that has made it an object of continuing fascination for contemporary art? The exhibition PARIS TEXAS takes its cue from key scenes in the celebrated 1984 film Paris, Texas by German avant-garde filmmaker Wim Wenders. PARIS TEXAS explores the modernist fascination with things like deserts, towering concrete overpasses, drive-in banks, billboards, and stripclubs. Like Wenders’s film, the exhibition does not seek to romanticize car travel but rather to see modern transport as a mode of displacement and estrangement, a place to expect the unexpected. Julie Cook’s Some Las Vegas Strip clubs reveals the at times sordid underside of the road, where distance from urban centres allows for the proliferation of the sex industry. With direct reference to the format of Ruscha’s books, Cook has published her own laconic photographs of various Vegas strip clubs. Not too unlike the one seen in Wenders’ film, these businesses are a reminder that the macho ethos of the open road has always gone hand-in-hand with a historically-informed division between the sexes.

PARIS TEXAS: Group exhibition curated by Paul Galvez. Exhibitors: Francis Alÿs, Davide Balula, Julie Cook, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Blair Thurman.