Topophany
a group show
Topophany is a group show with Hiroshi Clark, David Egan, Nathan Gulick, Seth Lower, Andreas Olesen, James Payne and Josh Steichmann, on February 9, at 620 S. Main.
A play on the word theophany, a manifestation of a deity in tangible form, the artists of Topophany take a decidedly unlofty, street level approach. Though photographic techniques, the works in Topophany focus on the evidence of the human, and our intervention in the spaces we inhabit, exploit, live and work:
Hiroshi Clark’s (https://www.hiroshi-clark.com) is showing a body of literal street photography — contact prints of asphalt enlarged to abstraction, where the specificity of the subject is heightened to a hyperreal memory that recalls the gouges cut by his father’s tool trailer, dragged to worksites all over Southern California.
David Egan’s (http://egandavid.com) “Far Away from the Place Where you Are” uses large format film photography to explore the area around the Salton Sea. Once compared to the French Riviera, Egan explores it as a place of solitude and alienation.
Nathan Gulick’s (https://nathangulick.com) site specific video installation work explores place through displacement, providing a “window” to the street directly behind the exhibition space on a time indexed loop. The prominent “for lease” banners of the spaces featured indicate a demarkation between past and future conditions of demographic change and commercial use that contrast with the conditions of the exhibition space itself.
Seth Lower’s (http://www.sethlower.com) “The Sun Shone Glaringly” project in book form plays with the way Los Angeles filming locations create their own referent places, having actors perform scenes both recreated from previous media and invented for this work, resulting in an uncanny experience of dissociation and suggestion.
Andreas Olesen’s (http://andreasolesen.com) “Oblique” series continues the long tradition of first using mythos to introduce landscapes into “legitimate art” (cf. Nicolas Poussin), then using landscapes to sneak photography into “legitimate art” (cf. Timothy O’Sullivan), playing with the fraught relationship between photography’s deixis and notions of fine art evocation.
James Payne (https://jamespaynephotography.com) started photographing family and friends in their studios and homes in 1977. Using a stereoscopic slide film approach, he created a deep archive of surprisingly immersive chronological documents that reproduce an experience of domestic spaces outside the gallery setting.
Josh Steichmann’s (https://steichmann.com/wp/) most recent body of work, “After the Flood,” is concerned with the forensic utility of still photographic documentation of the changing climate, specifically in the Glendale Narrows soft-bottomed portion of the Los Angeles River, and connecting traditional documentarian photography to the evidence of instability of natural features contrasted with the persistence of traditional silver gelatin techniques. Additionally, he will be showing pieces from “Short Creek,” about the internal creation of narrative of place in a heavily mediated rural space, and pieces from the “Trystero Index,” based on the diffident and disinterested facades of Los Angeles near suburbs.
The work will be on view through March 7. On March 7, a closing reception featuring a performance by Nihilanon will start at 8 p.m.
