Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2018 i Aperture

Laurie Simmons For the past forty years, Laurie Simmons has provocatively explored notions of gender roles, identity, and self-image through beguiling photographs of dolls, giant props, and cosplayers portrayed in fictionalized settings. “Laurie’s images acknowledge something we all do to a certain degree—dramatize portions of our actual lives through a combination of memory, nostalgia, and romanticizing of the past,” says Andrea Karnes, curator of Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, a major survey of Simmons’s photographs, films, and sculptures. Her work animates deep-set psychological tensions, leading the viewer to question how we envision desire and the ways we choose to see and project ourselves. Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, October 14, 2018–January 27, 2019 Shoji…

Contrary to popular wisdom, Los Angeles does have a center. Its heart is not spatial (hence the misconception), but memorial. Southern California has formed, pearl-like, around the grain of Latinx people and other people of color who claim the city in the names of their ancestors. Latinos and Latinas insist that LA is not Frederick Eaton’s irrigated Eden or Hollywood’s dream world, but a place whose language and land values, culture and prosperity were created by and with our great dead. Based in the LA suburb of Norwalk, photographer Christina Fernandez showcases this Los Angeles in her work. Fernandez’s early project Maria’s Great Expedition (1995–96) tells the narrative of an immortal immigrant who journeys from Mexico to Southern California in the nineteenth century. The first image reveals her wearing a…

“There was an obvious, loud blur between artifice and reality,” Ilene Segalove says of growing up in Los Angeles. “The Graduate was filmed across the street from my house in Beverly Hills. Dustin Hoffman’s stand-in kept asking me out on dates. My mom told me I should wait for the ‘real’ Dustin Hoffman, and then say, ‘Yes.’ That never happened.” Maybe not, but such slippages between reality and illusion would shape Segalove’s development as an artist. After studying with John Baldessari at CalArts, she worked in his studio, an experience that cemented the idea that in art anything is permissible. An early adopter of video art before the form even had a name, Segalove used playfulness and wit to create a distinctive body of work throughout the 1970s, often casting…

Around five years ago, Carter Mull started taking photographs of fashionable club kids he met at underground parties near his downtown Los Angeles studio. At these events, he used his camera as a social lubricant, initiating conversations and developing relationships but rarely using the photographs themselves in his artwork. Instead, he invited certain individuals to pose in his studio, positioning them in juxtaposition with his art or asking them to physically interact with objects such as the prototype jackets he had made in collaboration with Guess Jeans. The deal was that his models could freely use Mull’s images for self-promotion, just as he used them as components of his art. Mull makes art across all media—from drawing and video to collage and sculpture—reflecting critically on today’s hyper-abundance of images by…

In 1956, when he was eighteen years old, Ed Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles to attend art school. Along the way, he kept a notebook, writing down every stop for gas and how much he spent on meals. That signature balance of banality and precision—and an enduring fascination with American vernacular style—would find legendary outlets in Ruscha’s early artist’s books Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965). But the making of Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), a fifty-four-page, twenty-five-foot-long, accordion-folded book that documents more than two miles of Sunset Boulevard in two continuous views, was an enterprise unto itself. “It’s one of the most extraordinary records of an artist engaging with an urban form,” says Andrew Perchuk, acting director of the Getty…

Flaubert said that we only ever perceive the world in disparate fragments. Katrien De Blauwer’s work seems to take the French writer at his word. While studying fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp over the course of the 1990s, this Belgian artist made the collage technique her own. Patiently cutting and assembling images found in magazines from the 1920s to the 1960s, she recomposes scenes imbued with a fragmented intimacy. In them, bits of bodies, buildings, faces, and landscapes come together. Faced with these silent rebuses, our eyes identify the different fragments, pick out the cuts, reconnect possible links, and search out clues. The influence of cinema— from Italian neorealism to the films of Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock—is palpable, including in…

“LA is my big studio,” says Anthony Hernandez. “One day I’m in one corner, the next in the middle. It’s always interesting.” In this sprawling city, not known for a tradition of sidewalk-wandering image makers, Hernandez might be considered the resident street photographer of Los Angeles. For decades, he has surveyed the city’s streetscapes, including its growing crisis of homelessness, and the connections between social position and mobility. In his new series, Hernandez returns to an old subject, bus stops, but now with a formal approach that allows him to see the city in an altered way. For John Divola, too, LA acts as a studio, if in a more literal sense. His projects from the 1970s are improvisations in found, disused buildings. In this issue, Divola and Mark Ruwedel…

I first met Robert Heinecken, in 1995, at the Center for Creative Photography, located on the campus of the University of Arizona. The center had just acquired Heinecken’s personal archive, and he arrived that fall semester to conduct a seminar on his work with the history of photography graduate students. Despite the hundred-degree desert heat and the compressed time frame of a week, the artist’s trademark openness and availability were on display as we systematically examined and discussed every one of his 350 works in the archive. Photographs, prints, and 3-D objects, made between 1960 and 1991, revealed an artist who defied tradition and took risks to create multilayered, mass media–rich, color images that were often provocative and always compelling. Never had I been in the presence of an artist…

Wary cartographies comprise Los Angeles. The city’s relentless sprawl—spreading itself thin over five hundred square miles—evades any attempt to cultivate a singular identity. The area we consider LA is cut into eighty-eight little cities (Culver City, Inglewood) often patched together to approximate neighborhoods and informal districts (the Westside, East LA). Greater Hollywood is at the center, both in geography and mission, the metonymic scene hosting the storied studios, the Walk of Fame, and the iconic sign at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. Just over it, though, North Hollywood, in the San Fernando Valley, has become infamous for a parallel path to notoriety: since the 1970s, the Valley has been the hub for pornography production and distribution. The area’s low-lying, nondescript seediness and latent unease have fascinated establishment Hollywood (Paul…

In General Song, his solo exhibition at Klowden Mann Gallery in Culver City earlier this year—the title is a nod to Pablo Neruda—Rodrigo Valenzuela amplified the photographs in his series Barricades (2017) with a departure, a dramatic sculptural installation of a riot barricade. This new work productively harangued about the politics of exhibition and created a physical imposition, as all effective installation art does, that had been missing from Valenzuela’s previous series. This sculptural turn took the primary subject of his primary medium, photography, and accentuated its rebellious energy. Valenzuela is a fine arts professor of photography at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, who replaced renowned postconceptualist James Welling. This impressive ascent began in 2005, when Valenzuela traveled from Chile and crossed, undocumented, into the United States.…

“The California I believed in as a child was a mysterious land of perpetual recreation and exotic vegetation,” remarked Janna Ireland in 2012, not long after she’d left the East Coast and entered graduate school at UCLA. “I am still learning to reconcile my dream California with the real Los Angeles,” she added. While settling into her new home and the still unfamiliar landscape, Ireland worked on a series of photographs that pensively considered place and identity, deliberating over insistent mythologies while reframing notions of portraiture. On regular visits to a sprawling house in the San Fernando Valley (home to her husband’s grandfather), she posed herself—neatly turned out and almost expressionless—seated sur l’herbe in a lush garden or perched on an ornate settee in an unvisited parlor. Ireland’s watchful images…

James Welling: Los Angeles, Twice Lived I twice lived in Los Angeles: from 1971 to 1978, when I was a student at CalArts, and from 1995 to 2016, when I ran the Photography Area of the Department of Art at UCLA. The first class I took at CalArts was a video workshop taught by performance and video artist Wolfgang Stoerchle. Consequently, some of my early works, and those of my classmates, were video art as documentation. In addition to Stoerchle, John Baldessari was a significant figure at CalArts. Baldessari’s work at this time involved documenting activities, from throwing colorful sheets of paper out windows to pointing at green beans. From my perspective, documents of “performances” produced the best work in Los Angeles in the 1970s. The template for using the…

Guadalupe Rosales moved to New York with little more than a stack of wallet-sized photographs to remind her of home. She’d left Los Angeles in 2000, a few years after her cousin, Ever Sanchez, was stabbed to death at a party. Nearing her twenties, at the beginning of a new millennium, she decided to relocate her life to New York, where she’d remain living for over a decade. During that time, as she came of age away from the violence that had marked her youth, she held on to those photographs not only as reminders of unresolved trauma, but also as important links to her past. The photographs, given to her by family and friends she had grown up with in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, were all…

How do human beings—and human bodies—experience a culture that is structured around separation? How many ways can we be outside, looking in? And what are the consequences, conversely, of occupying inner spaces? Bodies in states of transition, and subjected to degrees of impermeability, are at the heart of Barak Zemer’s photographic interests. The title of his recent body of work, Aquarium (2012–16), sets the tone for a range of disorienting states of looking, states of containment, and, often, states of incongruity. Those dark and luminous spaces of immersion and separation act as metaphors both for his experience of Los Angeles and, more broadly, for a heavily structured and mediated experience of daily life in the twenty-first century. As he puts it, “The aquarium is how we live, encapsulated.” Zemer was born…

In the 1970s, the desire to integrate photography into a broader art context was still a minority position. Two decades later, however, when Charles Desmarais was director of the Laguna Art Museum, photography had become mainstream, and the medium had been all but fully embraced by the contemporary art world. Desmarais welcomed this shift. But, as he told me recently, he regretted that while Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and other members of the so-called Pictures Generation had become art world darlings, many of the photographers and artists he knew and admired in Southern California who used photography in their work had been “left behind.” With Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph 1960–1980, an exhibition he organized for the Laguna Art Museum in 1992, Desmarais made a case…

Twenty minutes into my conversation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya he makes me a diagram. On one end is a drawn figure, representing a photographer, and on the other, a straight line evincing the back of a studio wall. In between, but closer to the wall, is yet another line. This is meant to be a curtain, or a photographer’s backdrop. He labels these points—A (the photographer), B (the backdrop), and C (the wall)—and immediately starts talking about space. There’s the space between the photographer and the backdrop (AB), the slim space behind the backdrop (BC), and the space from the photographer to the back of the studio (AC). His question, although hardly stated as a question to me, is broadly this: Under what conditions do these spaces become visible? And…

Boys will be boyz will be bois. Or so it seems. This play on masculinity—repetition with a difference—isn’t lost on David Alekhuogie, who titled his 2017 solo show at Skibum MacArthur in Los Angeles, Them Boys. While the naming was a nod to the Wiz Khalifa tune “We Dem Boyz,” the LA-born photographer also considered the exhibition as “a way of talking about how you see black men in the streets, and what the formal signifiers of that are.” Despite the many tropes surrounding the spectacle of black masculinity, Alekhuogie insists on the salvo of rhetorical strategies: “It’s not always the storytelling. Sometimes it’s the accent, the cadence, the how: how a person is speaking, how they are telling the story.” For Alekhuogie, this emphasis on stylistics extends to the…

Los Angeles seems literally made of light. Most days, an unbroken blaze shines down from cloudless skies where palm trees casually sway, casting every detail of the city’s surfaces in forensic focus until they eventually disintegrate into the pink-hued explosion of sunset. Even as the light fades, neon signs illuminate shop fronts and sidewalks, parades of hazy red-and-white orbs make freeways glisten, and, viewed from the surrounding hills, the whole sprawling mass shimmers quietly. The bright lights of movie theater marquees beckon toward projected illusions inside and remind us that cinema chose Hollywood, in part, for its year-round promise of gleam. As the film industry flourished in the 1910s and ’20s, architects flocked here too, entranced equally by the city’s special quality of light and by the avant-garde spirit of…

There are the situations we find ourselves in, and then there are the situations Torbjørn Rødland puts us in. The Norwegian, Los Angeles–based photographer describes his process as being “like casting and directing a movie. Different actors will give you a different reaction to the same piece of direction,” he says, “and you do need them to give form and physicality to something vague and abstract.” But in these photographs “the difference is—there’s no script, no plot, no story.” Here, in the pliable romanticism of LA’s magic hour, under a blustering, set-flat version of Scandinavia’s thin sun, his images captivate the beautiful people. Rødland’s recent work might be summed up as variations on “two things touching”—a young, red-haired woman and an old, gray-haired one hug among some ferns; two youthful…