Outtakes presents works by four artists, all picturing alternative views of everyday life, installed around the permanent collection galleries of contemporary art. Riffing on the term “outtake,” a filmed or recorded scene not included in the final version, the exhibition brings together photographic and film works by four 2013 Carnegie International artists that were not presented in that exhibition. We also use the term to describe a certain “alternative” take on contemporary life. Rodney Graham, Pierre Leguillon, Joel Sternfeld, and Zoe Strauss each use film or photography redefine the artist’s relationship to his or her subject and surroundings, reframing our experience of the world.

Pierre Leguillon’s Arbus Bonus is an artwork that is also its own exhibition. The photographs, labels, framing, wall color, and even the crates that function as furniture were all selected and designed by the artist. Arbus Bonus encompasses 200 photographs by famed photographer Diane Arbus (1923–1971), bringing together every published magazine article featuring her editorial photography, rather than the street photography and portraiture for which she is best known. Leguillon’s consideration of this major yet overlooked aspect of Arbus’s oeuvre draws connections between her commercial work and her fine art photography and exposes a fascinating web of cultural connections, allusions, and coincidences. Leguillon’s project makes apparent how significant Arbus has been in defining the images of our popular culture.

Leguillon’s interest in a lesser known, but telling, dimension of an artist’s practice has been an important part of his work over the last 20 years. His contributions to the 2013 Carnegie International were installations that included artworks and related ephemera by the so-called “mad potter of Biloxi” George Ohr and the French expressionist Jean Dubuffet.

Outtakes is organized by Dan Byers, 2013 Carnegie International co-curator and Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.