DRIVE-THRU
Featuring: Lara Jo Regan
DRIVE-THRU is a large-scale environmental installation made up of portraits of anonymous fast food workers at night framed through their respective service portals. Each portrait approximates the actual size of the fast-food drive-thru window and the portraits are connected to each other by black expanse simulating the darkness of night. The viewer experiences an ongoing, immersive, nocturnal drive-thru, both haunting and strangely seductive.
DRIVE-THRU relates to Regan’s longstanding dedication to portraying the most disenfranchised members of society in unconventional, painterly ways (influenced by the work of early Dutch painters) while the installation as a whole serves to amplify the corporatization of the authentic and natural world – a central theme in Regan’s recent work.
The project also represents Regan’s interest in reinvigorating the informative and provocative nature of documentary images by pushing the tradition into more cinematic, abstract, and conceptual realms while still preserving its essential function of inciting meaningful, meditative contemplation of the real world.
She is particularly drawn to ubiquitous and mundane cultural manifestations whose significance and implications have been nullified by collective complacency.
An ongoing project now totaling thirty drive-thru portals, Regan literally shot each one while ordering fast food in her car around Los Angeles.
ARTIST BIO
Lara Jo Regan is a photographer whose diverse career spans the magazine, book, film, fine art and journalistic worlds.
She honed her skills as a regular contributor to the world’s leading publications such as TIME, Newsweek and LIFE, winning many of the field’s top honors including numerous Communication Arts and American Photography accolades, NPPA Pictures of the Year awards and the coveted World Press Photo of the Year.
Over the past three decades, Regan has produced one of the most extensive collections of Southern California photography in existence documenting its human and cultural landscape.
Her full-page photo column, “Lara Jo Regan’s SIGHTS UNSCENE” is a regular feature in Artillery, a Los Angeles-based arts magazine. She has authored six books of dog photography published by Random House, W.W. Norton and Myth and Matter Media.
Her longstanding passion for documentary photography has recently extended to editing and curating topic-driven books and shows as well as exploring ways to reinvigorate the presentation of real-world imagery into more immersive, conceptual and cinematic realms.
Regan’s work has been exhibited throughout the world and is part of many public and private collections.
For therapeutic relief she turns to nature and animals, an inadvertent successful sideline.