Join us for the In-Person Opening Reception on Wednesday, September 25, 2024, 6-8pm, at Laemmle Royal theater, 11523 Santa Monica Blvd, 1st floor, Los Angeles, CA 90025
Featuring Artists
Nancy Baron, Matt Henry, Cynthia Johnston
Curator
Rotem Rozental, Ph.D, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP)
About
Taking its name from Rosecrans Baldwin’s 2021 book about Los Angeles, Everything Now, this exhibition considers the meeting points between fiction and reality, narrative and fragmentary visions, illusions, fantasies and concrete presences, as these are revealed in how artists capture Americana and its presence in visual culture of the recent decades.
Against the backdrop of the hot, vast, fiery, lonely American deserts, or lush distant mountains touched by unreachable horizon lines, the works on view chronicle glimpses into the terrains that became synonyms with a cultural experience, connecting abandoned geographies, towering palm trees, ominous interiors, endless roads and bright lights with creative and collective ancestors, personal histories, and a desire to return to nature that always represents more than what meets the eye.
Taking place at the Laemmle Theaters, an iconic location in and of itself for film and film enthusiasts in Southern California, this exhibition has pop culture in mind. It is particularly interested in how vast landscapes are imagined and re-imagined and imagined yet again by artists who might work at a great geographical distance from this place, yet in surprisingly close proximity. In many ways, these works exist in the unexpected gaps between the concrete sites and how they were written into popular culture, between the environment and the textured ways in which it came to define a worldview and a desire to belong and remain distant, all at once.
