Project XV: New Perspectives on Photography Opens January 4th
Los Angeles — Fifteen Southern California photographic artists share their uniquely personal bodies of work in the exhibition Project XV: New Perspectives on Photography, which runs from January 4 to February 2, 2020 at the Los Angeles Center of Photography. It is the opening exhibition in the LACP’s new home at 5566 W. Washington Blvd. in Mid City Los Angeles.
The artists include:
Andy House, Beth Dubber, Carissa Dorson, Elisa Haber, Ellen Friedlander, Hilary White, Julia Bennett, Kristina Shires, Krysia Lukkason, Mara Zaslove, Michael Hacker, Michelle Elkins, Sharon Johnson-Tennant, Wayne Swanson and Yulia Tregub Morris.
The exhibition explores the essence of being human: examining issues of family and relationships, aging, creativity, the importance of place, and new perspectives on the California landscape — present and past. The photographers will also display artist books they created and selected images from the group’s Instagram conversation, @XVprojects.
Although each of the projects is personal, they all are the result of a collaborative development process over the course of the year under the mentorship of Aline Smithson.
The opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 4, from 5:00pm to 8:00pm at the Los Angeles Center of Photography. The artists will discuss their projects on January 23 from 7:00pm-9:00pm.
The following is an overview of the projects on display:
• As a street photographer, Andy House is primarily interested in shooting people to capture their interesting moments. Expanding My Vision represents his attempt to broaden his view in abstract ways to examine and parse those moments. He uses multiple techniques to explore captured moments in different ways.
• In Absentia is a series of vignettes about various themes of the adoptee experience, created by Beth Dubber, an adoptee from the closed adoption system of Ohio.
• Anywhere and Everywhere is an exercise in being present. Carissa Dorson takes Polaroids of herself in moments when she is feeling particularly anxious or sad, and then carries them with her as she looks for simple beauties in her daily life. This juxtaposition shows that no matter how beautiful or mundane the surroundings, these feelings exist anywhere and everywhere.
• The Twins is Elisa Haber’s ongoing series about the twins of Twin’s Days in Twinsburg, Ohio. It is the largest Twins Festival in the world, with an average of 3,000 sets of twins gathering annually in the first weekend in August. Haber has been photographing the event, which has a different theme each year, since 2016.
• Betrayal: Shattered in a Moment is an ongoing body of work conceived by Ellen Friedlander as she confronted the realization that everything her children and she had experienced was a lie: her husband of 25 years had fathered a child and they were unknowingly replaced. Friedlander uses multiple in-camera settings and cutting and reassembling of original photographs to process layers of toxic emotional trauma to help overcome paralyzed sadness and understand these very complex emotions, hoping that this work stirs a new conversation.
• The Patriarchy and Me by Hilary White is a timely photographic memoir that explores family, fatherhood, childhood and the deep frailties of being human. It’s a visual diary with her father about what was unspeakable — love, money, power, sex and the secrets and lies that bound them together and tore them apart. It combines archival and conceptual images that respond to her father’s “Mad Man” lifestyle and how she internalized patriarchal culture.
• The alley is friendly, yet tense. Private, but disturbingly intimate. It is where the relics of your neighbors’ spring cleaning scatter and the high schoolers smoke pot and cars are fixed and cans are collected. In South Holt, Julia Bennett takes comfort in imagining that as neighborhoods in Los Angeles change and evolve, the alley has always been this way; that the scraps of life and forgotten things of its residents have always floated along in the breeze, away from the context of their original ownership.
• Believe is a series of photographs by Kris Shires exploring play, story and light through constructed still lifes.
• In her series My California, Krysia Lukkason explores all 58 counties within California. With the largest population, third largest physical size, second-highest elevation and lowest elevation in the country, California is a varied and diverse landscape that is more than its iconic hotspots. Lukkason offers a peek into the everyday to give a sense of place beyond what California is known for.
• Aging Gracefully is Mara Zaslove’s study of a woman in the last chapter of her life. Unfortunately, many people see getting older as a trial and advancing in years, a disability. Zaslove is hopeful that these photographs will stand as a metaphor to demystify aging and encourage the viewer to continue to embrace the “joy” in everyday living.
• Everything Passes is a series of images made by Michael Hacker in Hollywood in 1987 and 1988, capturing the time just before the neighborhoods were changed forever by massive development. Almost everything in these photos is now gone. The passage of thirty years has transformed them from an objective document of a moment into a bittersweet memory of color and space.
• Do our hands really tell us something about ourselves and our future? Talk to the Hand is a collaborative inquiry among palmist, subjects, and Michelle Elkins. This series combines photographs of each subject’s hand, an ink handprint, and the subject’s honest response to the palmist’s reading.
• Sharon Johnson-Tennant’s A Stilled Life explores the core of what is important in her life by combining collected elements from the natural world and the essence of her children to create a new way of looking at beauty and memory.
• In From the Workshop, Wayne Swanson explores the creative impulse by focusing on the furniture created by his father. Using individual prints, grids, collages, and 3-dimensional constructions, he evokes his father’s work process, sophisticated woodworking techniques, creative detail, and devotion to his work. The resulting images celebrate the passion of a craftsman.
• Moscow –LA is an ongoing project that Yulia Tregub Morris has been working on since she moved to Los Angeles from Moscow in 2013. These images convey the way she sees, feels, and adjusts to living in a new home, and how she experiences Moscow when she returns as a visitor. Sometimes they are blurred, or show overlapping thoughts of two significant cities in her life.
The gallery is open 10:00 am-5:00 pm Tuesday-Sunday.
