John Divola: As Far As I Could Get
Campbell, Emmons, Gould, Sterling Morton and Von Romberg Galleries
10-13-2013 through 1-12-2014
John Divola Checklist (as of 8-5-2013)
Press Release and Overview
Quick Guide by Lisa Volpe
Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert
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In its earliest years as an artistic practice, photography in the United States evolved primarily out of two locations—New York and California. It has taken nearly one hundred years for the photographic medium to be received as an equal to painting, drawing and sculpture, and even longer for Los Angeles to be recognized as a major center for contemporary art practice. The recent initiative, Pacific Standard Time, focused on the prolific art scene in the greater Los Angeles area from 1945 to 1980, but the vibrant art community continues to this day. Curator Tim Wride noted that California photographers were “present at the beginnings of a burgeoning academic discourse and mentoring process that would transform the photographic landscape.”
In traversing contemporary interests in photography and in California, one lands immediately at the work and practice of John Divola. Since his 1970s graduate school days at UCLA, Divola has focused his artistic vision on Southern California. This sprawling, dynamic and everchanging landscape has been Divola’s primary studio hroughout the past four decades.
John Divola’s images confound and provoke, but perhaps more important and less common in the art experience today, they delight: dots and lines hover on seemingly multiple planes; doorways and windows lead from nowhere to somewhere else; dogs race with spontaneous energy; dark marks ooze forth from damaged walls, part of this world, and yet otherworldly. Embodying presence and absence, stillness and motion, his work bears a quality of impermanence inherent to west coast sensibilities, while asserting the authenticity of the photographic image as an imprint of a moment in space and time.
This mid-career survey, an exhibition which is shared among three institutions—Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Pomona College Museum of Art—is the result of a unique collaboration. It is hoped that viewers will visit each venue to gain a full appreciation of this prolific artist’s practice and his contribution to the medium of photography.
– John Divola, As Far As I Could Get Wall Text, 2013