Laguna Beach Festival Season Launches At Laguna Art Museum

LAGUNA BEACH, CA—Photographer Matthew Rolston’s “Art People: The Pageant Portraits” exhibit opens June 27th at Laguna Art Museum, and it's the ideal kickoff to festival season. These huge, close-up studies of the Pageant’s volunteers in full makeup were shot backstage in an improvised studio over 3 weeks in 2016, beginning with dress rehearsals, during intermissions and after the show once it opened.

Removed from the special effects and theatrical sleight-of-hand the Pageant employs to re-create famous artworks, the subjects’ live, human qualities shine through. The volunteers may be retail clerks and grandmas by day, but during the performances and then again as subjects of the famous photographer, they become true “art people."

“Portraiture has always been my subject,” said Rolston on “Change Lab,” the podcast produced by his alma mater, Art Center College of Design. As a student there in the late 1970s, he was tapped by Andy Warhol to photograph Steven Spielberg for Interview magazine. Unstoppable, his career capturing celebrities and creating ideal images of beauty for glamour magazines never lagged, even when he shifted to art direction and music videos.

Rolston's signature lighting techniques and eye for both beauty and its opposite continue to evolve.

In 2010, his first foray into fine artwork took portraiture toward the grotesque. “Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits” are 60-x-60-inch headshots of ventriloquist dummies in the Vent Haven collection. Close-ups of the heavily painted faces with closed lips or open jaws allow viewers to reflect on a deeper, but common, human impulse: to animate the inanimate. From childhood on, we like to imbue life into things that are not alive.

The underlying human compulsion explored in “Art People" is art-making itself, Rolston explained on the podcast.

The L.A. native has been entranced by the orchestral music, visual splendor and narration of the Pageant of the Masters since his childhood, when his family attended many a summer. At age 6 or 7, he says, the Pageant swept him off his feet.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and friends who also loved it as kids arranged a trip to Laguna Beach. It was Rolston’s first time seeing the tableaux vivants as an adult, and on impulse, he brought his high-resolution Nikon field glasses.

His first glimpse through those binoculars revealed the imperfection and humanity of the individuals who’d been transformed into art. That's when the idea for “Art People” struck him.

The deeply hued, large-scale prints reveal both the wrinkles of age and the brush marks of the makeup application. Through the faux marble, brass or oil-paint makeup, the bloodshot eyes of the human being underneath the greasepaint look back.

“Art People” is Rolston’s first West Coast museum solo show. And it marks the final curatorial effort of Laguna Art Museum’s former director, Malcolm Warner. When you visit LAM this summer, you can view Warner's final two exhibitions: “Art People” and “Wayne Thiebaud Clowns.”

Regular museum hours are back to a pre-pandemic schedule, including First Thursdays when admission is free.

Be sure to check out the exhibit's accompanying catalogue, as it's a work of art in itself. The full-color portraits fold out in a concertina style, and are available in two versions, with the deluxe edition including a signed print. The three essays within establish Rolston's work firmly within the art colony's photographic history.

Rolston's inner child must be jazzed that one of the catalogue's essays is written by Dan Duling, Pageant scriptwriter for the past 40 years.