Official Welcome is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based photographer, courtney coles (b. 1989, Sylmar, CA), opening on Saturday, July 12, 2025 from 6 – 8pm. The exhibition will be on view through August 30, 2025 during normal gallery hours, Thursday – Saturday 12pm – 6pm and by appointment.
coles’ intimate, analogue work documents erotic play and women’s sexuality outside of the preferences and desires of men. Her work is always rooted in home – the container of the domestic space as the safe place for love to take many forms – sex, rest, family, care of all kinds. Still Mo(u)rning includes new works made in Pasadena, CA and Los Angeles, CA in the Spring of 2025.
coles’ work rests on a history of queer and feminist photography. The work is documentary–Populated by the artist, her lovers, her family and their intimate spaces. This is a throughline in the work of artists like Sheree Rose (b 1941), Nan Goldin (b. 1953), Laura Aguilar (b. 1959 – d. 2018), Cathie Opie (b. 1961), Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965), Elle Pérez (1989), Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982), and Zackary Drucker (b. 1983) to name just a few. All have made work documenting their communities of lovers, friends, and themselves, with profound intimacy, openness about erotic interests, and warm tenderness that protects their sitters’ power even in very vulnerable images.
When I first met coles, we sat at a mutual friend’s kitchen table, where she was housesitting. Our conversation ranged from growing up in Southern California, to Carrie Mae Weems’ 1990 Kitchen Table Series (why do we so rarely see the photograph where she is masturbating at the table?), to our moms, to Cathie Opie’s iconic 1993 photo Cutting, through and around stacks of test prints arrayed on the warm walnut. I am someone who is interested in power and surrender from many perspectives – spiritual, social, political, and erotic. If you look around, submission and domination are expressed everywhere all the time with varying levels of awareness, and often with little attention to pleasure. Tenderness, sadly, is absent from a lot of spirituality, socializing, politics, and sex. I am someone who is interested in tenderness as a radical form of power and in that interest, I found alignment with coles, at the kitchen table.
coles’ work sometimes documents various levels of bondage and sadism– chains, knives, hoods are all present. As is evidence of rest and softness: rumpled pale pink sheets, a black lace bra hanging on the back of the door neatly. In the warm glow of sunlight filtering through windows or low wattage incandescent lamps, it isn’t that the edge of this rough play is dulled, but that we see it through the lens of someone participating with pleasure, softness, and devotion. Meeting desire with mutuality, clarity, and openness is a profound form of care.
It should also be noted that coles’ works are made on film using a 35mm and medium format camera. They are not posed – so, the images are sometimes soft, created in the heat of the moment. The grain of film and the warmth of her prints lends a tactile quality to the work that is so far from the digital image landscape we inhabit 24/7 on our backlit screens as to seem like a fundamentally different media. And it is.
courtney coles is a Black-American photographer and leatherdyke who was born and raised in Sylmar, California. She received her MFA in Photography & Media from California Institute of the Arts in 2019 and her BFA in Photography from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2014. Alongside her art practice, coles has made photographs in the music industry and portraits for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Substream Magazine, idobi Radio, Highlight Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle and Hopeless Records. In 2022, she was part of a package with the Wall Street Journal that was a Pulitzer Finalist. coles’ first solo exhibition in Los Angeles was at No Moon LA in 2022. She has been included in group exhibitions at Manos Amigues, Mexico City; Plummer Park, West Hollywood; the Punk Rock Museum, Las Vegas, NV; The Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles; and the Vincent Price Art Museum among others. coles is currently an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Cypress College.
