John Divola “Theodore Street Project”

Maccarone

poster for John Divola “Theodore Street Project”

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Maccarone gallery presents Theodore Street Project, its first solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based photographer John Divola.

The twelve photographs in Theodore Street Project function as a set of artifacts of an extended engagement with a residential structure in Moreno Valley, California between 2008 and 2013. Initial images were shot with an 8 x 10 view camera, later segueing into the use of a Gigapan scanning device originally developed by NASA for the Mars Rover cameras. During the course of an up-to-twenty minute exposure, a camera mounted on the Gigapan scans a scene taking multiple images (120 in this case), then digitally composites the information into a singular large-scale photograph with exceptional visual resolution.

The resulting work acts as an evidentiary reading of the presence, absence, vandalism, and withering in a single location over time. Each floating mark, crumbling doorway, and desert vista are inscribed as an index of time, place, process, and circumstance. Divola’s abstract mark-making and physical engagement are put into dialogue with the loaded anonymous graffiti left between his visits: that evolving interior along with Divola’s own additive painting create a palimpsest recording human presence, temporal progression, and entropy.

Divola’s forty-year practice has yielded many canonical series — the Zuma series, the Vandalism series, the Isolated Houses series — using the California landscape as a centrifuge between abstraction and specificity. Southern California in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been the extraordinary and dynamic context of Divola’s engagement with the contemporary environmental equilibrium. Throughout his multi-dimensional practice, Divola has often used uninhabited structures and the surrounding environment as studio for his own idiomatic work.

John Divola’s work has been featured in more than seventy solo exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Europe, Mexico, and Australia. The retrospective “John Divola: As Far As I Could Get” was held concurrently at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Pomona College Museum of Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2013. Since 1975, John Divola has been a professor of photography and art at numerous institutions including California Institute of the Arts (1978-1988), and since 1988 at the University of California, Riverside.

Media

Schedule

from March 12, 2016 to April 23, 2016

Opening Reception on 2016-03-12 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

John Divola

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