Grand Arts
1819 Grand Boulevard
Kansas City
816-421 6887
Laurel Nakadate, Stay the Same Never Change
February 1-March 15, 2008

Stay the Same Never Change is a feature-length film shot in Kansas City is in the summer of 2007. Featuring amateur and first-time actors culled from open casting calls in Kansas City, Stay the Same Never Change is both a fictional account of everyday lives, and a portrait of a real place. "Filled," as Neil LaBute has written in his essay to accompany the show, "with the silence of modern neighborhood life and the serenity and terror of childhood." Stay the Same Never Change is an unsettling fiction delivered through familiar places, events, and experiences of youth and the American Midwest. Bathed in the blinding light and sticky heat of Kansas City's summer, local landmarks set the stage for this keenly observed and deeply unsettling coming-of-age story.

From its first frames, Stay the Same Never Change sounds the low hum of something awful about to happen. The male lead, a "family man" whose wife encourages him to join a club so he can socialize with other men, cruises suburban streets at night in his four-door sedan, peering through living room windows and fantasizing is escape from the doldrums of daily existence. It doesn't take him long to find what he's looking for.

Based on Nakadate's original script, Stay the Same Never Change is largely improvised by its cast, who opened real-life homes, yards, bedrooms, and other private spaces to Nakadate's lens. Situated alongside films such as Harmony Korine's Gummo and Stephen Soderbergh's Bubble, which used amateur casts with a number of trained actors. Stay the Same Never Change is a project by a female director, made in six months with one professional actor participating.

Stay the Same Never Change runs continuously in Grand Arts' main gallery, and is accompanied by a series of printed film stills on view in the side gallery.

Laura Nakadate was raised in Ames, Iowa and lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. A 2001 graduate of Yale's MFA photography program, she began her career as a documentary photographer, which led to making documentary-style videos featuring the artist paired with random men who she persuaded to "perform" with her in front of the camera. Nakadate's first video installation for which she is probably best known, I Wanna Be Your Midlife Crisis. was exhibited by Daniel Silverstein Gallery in the 2002 Armory Show. We are All Made of Stars, Nakadate's first New York solo show, was also presented by Daniel Silverstein gallery in 2002. Since this debut, Nakadate has continued to perform for the camera in work for her two solo shows presented by Danziger Projects in New York: 2005's Love Hotel and Other Stories, 2006's A Message to Pretty, and 2007's Laurel Nakadate, presented by Chalk Horse Gallery in Sydney, Australia. Nakadate produced her first feature-length film for Grand Arts, using a script to build the fictional narrative and notably removing herself from the picture. In 2007 Nakadate participated in several group shows nationally and internationally including Americans in New York at Gallery Michel Rein in Paris, Identity Thieves at Sydney's Asia-Australia Arts Centre-Gallery 4A, and 50,000 Beds at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Nakadate has exhibited at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, MOMA/PS1's Greater New York Show, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Kunstfilm Biennial in Cologne, the Berlin Biennial, New York's Asia Society and at Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Nakadate's work has been reviewed in the Village Voice, Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Sun, French Vogue, Frieze, and Flash Art. Ms. Nakadate has been interviewed by Scott Indrisek for The Believer in 2006 and by Erin Krause for Vice TV's Art Talk in 2007.

Laurel Nakadate, LN2, Detail, 2005, Digital c-print, 24 x 30", courtesy Danziger Projects.