JAMES NACHTWEY – MEMORIA

Posted on 2022-06-13

Each photograph in this exhibition is a fragment of memory, captured within the continuum of the history Nachtwey experienced. Each image was intended to reach a mass audience at the time the events were taking place, as a way of raising public consciousness; one element among many in the process of change.

Now, as that same continuum moves relentlessly forward, and the events themselves recede in time, the artist’s hope is that these pictures will stand as a remembrance of the people in them, of the conditions they endured and of how those conditions came to be.

Opposite – Afghanistan, Kaboul, 1996

Exhibition runs through to August 21st, 2022

Fotografiska New York
281 Park Ave South/22nd
New York, NY 10010

www.fotografiska.com

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BLACK VENUS

Posted on 2022-06-13

Juxtaposed against archival depictions of Black women dating back to 1793, the contemporary works on view collectively create a global, cross-generational investigation into Black women’s reclamation of agency amid the historical fetishization of the Black female body

Curated by Aindrea Emelife, the exhibition’s thematic foundation is the Hottentot Venus, a visual-culture archetype named for the assigned stage name of Saartje Baartman (born 1789 in South Africa). Enslaved by Dutch colonizers and toured around Europe as part of a ‘freak show’ due to her non-Western body type, caricatured depictions of her spread around the globe and indelibly catalyzed the Western exoticization and othering of Black women. In BLACK VENUS, archival depictions of Baartman and other historical Black women pair with the vibrant, narrative portraiture by some of today’s most influential Black image-makers whose work deals with layered narratives of Black femininity.

Opposite – Coreen Simpson, ‘Black Girl with Eye’ (1992) from ‘About Face’ series

Exhibition runs through to August 21st, 2022

Fotografiska New York
281 Park Ave South/22nd
New York, NY 10010

www.fotografiska.com

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ROBERT G. ACHTEL – THE CITY OF NAMARA

Posted on 2022-06-13

The City of Namara by Robert G. Achtel presents an American city that exists somewhere between reality and fiction through nine original composites meticulously created from the artist’s photographs and designs. The citizens are nowhere to be seen, yet it’s the implied human drama presented in each piece that pulls the viewer into a thrilling narrative of excess and despair. On the surface, the series alludes to a period of architectural upheaval when the standards of Modernism were questioned, if not rejected, by a new school of designers. At the end of the 1960s, the truth had become all but relative and this new age was embedded in the architecture through irony, seduction, and profitability.

Opposite – JEALOUSY, 2020

Exhibition runs through to August 21st, 2022

Marshall Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave. #A6
Los Angeles
CA 90404

marshallgallery.art

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MICHAEL LIGHT – L.A. DAY / L.A. NIGHT

Posted on 2022-06-06

Photographed in 2004 and 2005, each image within L.A. DAY/ L.A. NIGHT offers its own individual view of the city of Los Angeles from a perspective of several hundred to several thousand feet above its tallest buildings.

Conceived as complementary parts of a whole, L.A. DAY showcases the sprawling metropolis with beauty and concern, capturing its staggering scale while foreshadowing its continual growth into the foreseeable future. Concrete highways curl and twist over one another, sophisticated architectural marvels of engineering glisten in the golden light while man-made rivers cut through hillsides, transporting water through the once-arid desert. Familiar local sites may be active and busy but viewed from a distance Light’s images lend a calming sense of space to an area teeming with 4 million inhabitants living in close proximity.

Opposite – Los Angeles July [Moon], 2007

Exhibition runs through to June 30th, 2022

Danziger Gallery Los Angeles
Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue
Los Angeles
CA 90404

www.danzigergallery.com

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IAN VAN COLLER – NATURALISTS OF THE LONG NOW

Posted on 2022-06-06

Climate change has compressed and conflated human and geologic time scales, making it essential to find ways to conceptualize “deep time.” My project, Naturalists of the Long Now, seeks to make notions of deep time comprehensible through visual exploration of glacier ice, as well as other earthly archives. Initially inspired by the 10,000 Year Clock Project of the Long Now Foundation, I have begun collaborating with scientists to make art that challenges viewers to think about the vast scales of geologic time—both past and future—that are recorded not only in the earth’s ice bodies, but in trees, sediments, and fossils.

Exhibition runs through to July 2nd, 2022

Blue Sky Gallery
122 NW 8th Avenue
Portland
OR 97209

www.blueskygallery.org

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GOSETTE LUBONDO – IMAGINARY TRIP

Posted on 2022-06-06

Congolese photographer Gosette Lubondo’s Imaginary Trip series probes the intersections of memory and architecture, examining tensions between residual colonial constructs and contemporary life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lubondo places herself in these pictures, wearing a range of guises and interacting with other subjects. Bodies fluctuate in and out of corporeality; some are solidly in the present while others seem to emerge from a ghostly past.

Opposite – Imaginary Trip I, 2016

Exhibition runs through to July 3rd, 2022

Fowler Museum At UCLA
308 Charles E. Young Dr N
Los Angeles
CA 90024

fowler.ucla.edu

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