Gia Coppola, Sage Grazer, Tracy Antonopoulos: Watch Out Boys

GIA COPPOLA, TRACY ANTONOPOULOS, SAGE GRAZER. PHOTO BY THE COBRA SNAKE

Last Thursday in a rented Melrose Place storefront that had previously hosted one of Lauren Conrad’s fashion shows, Gia Coppola, Sage Grazer, and Tracy Antonopoulos gave young Hollywood more than a few portraits of the artist as a young girl with a one-night-only, all-female group art show. While their famous families packed a star-studded crowd—Gia’s aunt Sofia Coppola, Sage’s father Brian Grazer, Stephen Dorff, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, and Marisa Tomei—the art spoke for itself (as did the trio’s production capabilities). “I was talking with Gia’s mom and she was talking about Gia’s work and I thought let’s do a show,” says Grazer, a 21-year-old college senior who showed at the National Arts Club as a sophomore at NYU. For this exhibition she mounted 23 small-scale shots of her travels over the past year which deftly examine scale and color. In a landscape (Malibu, all works, 2009) shot from a family friend’s backyard Grazer turns the Malibu Trailer Park into a brilliant, model-sized trim beneath an expansive SoCal sky. Elsewhere, she skillfully channeled Hockney’s West Coast hues in a pic of her father’s pool filled with two lonely beach balls (Pool Balls) and another of her brother Patrick floating face down (Patrick Pool). There’s even an indiscriminate couple that appears to hover over an East Village rooftop in a shot simply titled Roof People.

“Throughout the show people kept asking me if they were real photos,” says Grazer, who’s currently working on a series of portraits based around a group of masks skate icon/artist Mark Gonzales crafted from “No Parking” and “Reserved” signs. “It’s either people sitting outside or in their home. They’re casual, but posed, as if this person is wearing this mask like that’s what they do everyday.”

For her part, Coppola says she wanted to team up with her girlfriends because “I noticed a lot of my guy friends were having all-male art shows. They usually have one girl, but that isn’t enough.” Approaching her section of the show, she took some cues from her old dorm room at Bard. “I had a bulletin board above my desk with all my photos and things I liked,” she says. “I was running out of ideas to take pictures because it was so cold so I would just take pictures of my room.” The 23-year-old photographer arranged various portraits and Polaroids (including one shot of her bulletin board) in a Rorschach style that wrapped a visual narrative along the walls.

Following in her aunt and grandfather’s footsteps, Coppola, with Antonopoulos, recently wrote and directed a film for NYC clothing boutique Opening Ceremony featuring her cousin Jason Schwartzman and Kirsten Dunst. “We’re currently in the process of editing,” reports Antonopoulos, who is also 23. Here Antonopoulos screened three fake trailers and concert footage of Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, The Virgins, and the band Dawes on four old televisions along with a silent eight-minute short called Piece of Meat. Shot in 16mm in New York’s Little Italy and starring Matt Creed (as a greaser) and Courtney Falsey (as his girlfriend), the film examines control issues and male-female relationship dynamics through the lens of comfort food. “He does all these things to hurt his girlfriend and the way that she copes is eating fried chicken,” says Antonopoulos, noting she’s also working on a video of Casablancas’ recent Los Angeles residency at the Downtown Palace Theatre for this website. “There are no specific plans to show in the future, but I would definitely be open to the idea of doing a show in New York, and anywhere else that is feasible.”

She’s not alone. The trio is hoping to replicate their pop-up gallery in New York sometime this year. In other words: Watch out boys.