The stories we tell ourselves: Sophie Calle at the Orange County Museum of Art

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. For more than 50 years, the French artist Sophie Calle has worked in the space between facts and their retelling, demonstrating how the narratives we share about ourselves are always partial, constructed. Working across photography, text, film and installation, she reveals how fantasy and projection intervene in our best attempts to see and be seen."

"In the late 1970s, Calle photographed the words 'mother' and 'father' engraved on headstones in a Bolinas cemetery in the Bay Area, anticipating the mix of intimacy, memory and absence that would come to define her practice. She went on to stage her first major exhibition at Fred Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles in 1989."

"In the installation Journey to California (2003), correspondence, black-and-white photographs and a carefully wrapped oversize package document the time that the San Francisco artist Josh Greene wrote to Calle asking if he might spend the months following a breakup in her bed. Calle duly shipped off her bedstead, mattress and sheets, which Greene returned to Paris six months later."

Sophie Calle's comprehensive exhibition Overshare at the Orange County Museum of Art surveys her work from the 1970s to present, examining the boundaries between public and private, documented and performed. Her practice demonstrates how fantasy and projection shape our attempts to see and be seen, building on Joan Didion's observation that we tell ourselves stories to live. California holds particular significance in Calle's career, from her early cemetery photographs in Bolinas to her first major Los Angeles exhibition in 1989. The exhibition, organized by the Walker Art Center and curated by Henriette Huldisch, represents Calle's first comprehensive North American survey, featuring installations that document intimate exchanges and personal narratives.

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