Book Room


85 7 20


November 16 - December 22, 2024

Hiroshi Clark


    “My mother was part of a Japanese exchange student program in 1983 when she met my father in Orange County, California. He was 18 years old. After her return to Japan, my lovesick father sold his Nissan pickup truck and bought a ticket to Japan to court my mother. Once there, he rented a small room in a basement and got a job at a “cowboy bar” in Tokyo.
    Tucked away in a closet, my mother keeps hundreds of negatives. There is little preciousness to her system of organization which consists of putting any and all negatives in a dirty plastic craft bin within a cardboard box containing two point and shoot film cameras. Much of my family’s existing archive is in this box. She was always one step away from tossing it entirely. My mother saves a lot of things and if it were up to my father, this would have been thrown out long ago.
    My mother and I have different first languages. Much gets mistranslated and lost. We once talked about Kokoro. My mother read her old copy from the 70’s while I read the version that was translated to English. We talked about some of the themes. It was much easier to discuss sadness in the work than it was to talk about the ramifications of a rapidly modernizing world. I wanted to talk to her about globalization and capitalism and since I didn’t have the words, we settled on the heartbreak at the center of the story.
    I recently took on the arduous task of digitizing the neglected negatives from the closet. Through this gesture I encountered photos of people I didn’t know existed, as well as moments left out of the photo albums I was already familiar with. Left only with a timestamp of the date in the corner of an image to work with, have I been able to cobble together a semblance of history.” - Hiroshi Clark



Dandelion


June 29 - August 4, 2024

Seth Lower



“Dandelion”, an exhibition of all nine of Los Angeles artist Seth Lower’s blue spiral-bound diary books.

Made over the course of eight years, the related-but-separate volumes combine images and text to cover a huge range of territory and life experience, revolving around the life-shattering cancer diagnosis of Lower’s wife Jo-hsin in the middle of the COVID-19 outbreak.

‘”When people asked my wife Jo-hsin what I take pictures of she would say “rocks and trash.” This project is perhaps my most sustained effort yet at looking at rocks and trash, but it is also the places we went, the things we talked about, and what our home was like before it was ripped apart by cancer.’

Small changes can be seen from day to day and page to page, witnessed in long sequences of subtly different images, taken in and around the couple’s home, and on two subsequent trips dealing with love, loss, and Lower’s need to record the world changing around him.

Also on view are a selection of prints from Dandelion, the third book in the series.




All That’s Fit

with Deadbeat Club

May 11 - June 15, 2024

Ian Bates
Taylor Galloway
Yoko Ikeda

Ward LongChad Moore

Established in 2011 by Clint Woodside, Deadbeat Club is a renowned independent publisher & coffee roaster located in Los Angeles, California. Rooted in contemporary photography, our ethos on small run, limited edition publications carries into our small batch single origin, signature blend and limited release coffees.

Deadbeat Club curates its projects in the spirit of collaboration and lasting partnership. Together with the artists - whether established or up-and-coming - we work closely to produce a body of work that we are proud to share with our community.




Gallery

Pridi in Paris


November 16 - December 22, 2024


Prima Sakuntabhai



The exhibition features a dual-channel video installation and soundscape, Maps of Paris. Conceived and built by my friend, Manop Buranamest, the installation consists of a piece of glass that reflects the video playing from a monitor, overlaying with another video projection. These layerings of histories, both political and personal, reconstruct my own journey throughout the city of my youth and the invisible legacy of my great grand uncle, Pridi Banomyong. After studying at the Faculty of Law in the Sorbonne where he absorbed the ideals of French Republicanism, Pridi returned to Thailand and organized the 1932 Siamese Revolution that changed the system of government in Thailand, from an absolute monarchy to a parliamentary democracy. Later forced into self-exile, he ended his days in Paris. 

In lieu of plaques and bronze statues, I rubbed the surface of these buildings and streets to obtain a semblance of historical relics. Printed on clear vinyl banners, the rubbings form a contrast with the linearity of the map, confound space and time and reorient our bodies in the imaginary space composed of fragments of places. Accompanying collages act as a subtext, an annotation to the abstraction of these places.



Stage Presence


June 29 - August 4, 2024

Lacey Lennon
Arlene Mejorado
Andrea C. Nieto
Sasha Phyars-Burgess
Emilianna Vazquez
Curated by Keko Jackson



To emit a stage presence, an audience is required regardless of how big or small. In photography, this presence is the product of its many variables including the stage and its audience, which both have the potential to take on a variety of shapes, sizes and responsibilities. For some, the person looking at the final photograph from the outside becomes the audience, whereas others suggest the primary audience is the person who’s being photographed—usually collaborators in the process. Another variable: the “performer” has a responsibility to the audience to deliver an action no matter how subtle or scripted and it is this action that becomes the subject of the photo.

Because photography invokes the absence of the physical, the challenge lies in discerning what is found and what is arranged, or in other words how framing prompts the duration of a performance making less clear when it’s over and reality begins. Despite photography’s ability to render things more real, the different scales of performance complicate this process (i.e. hired actors, casual encounters, long term relationships, empty spaces, assembled structures, staged landscapes and documentary). What becomes more real is how photographs lend themselves to expressing kinds of interior truths through an imaginative or performed action.

In this case, photography can be seen as an act of communication and performance as a told story. Each image contains an implied narrative similar to the effect of a film still where spaces alone can become stories too. The action in the photograph is used to share social knowledge through ephemeral and embodied acts of transfer that communicate ways of being, feelings and memories that can only be understood by looking at a photo. The different scales of performance on display here explore the malleability of the photographic space as a theatre and exchange of ideas meeting people where they’re at and picking up what they’re putting down. 




Beyond The Apparatus


May 11 - June 15, 2024

David Campany
Edward Cushenberry
Eduardo Consuegra
Don Edler
Luke Harnden
Steve Kado
Soo Kim
Jacob Murtle
Juliana Paciulli
Pacifico Silano





Before photography became a tool to fix the three-dimensional world onto the two-dimensional surface of an object, society relied on artists to depict reality. Photography relieved artists of this duty. It can be argued that the way we view the world since the invention of photography is through a series of images. This multiplicity of images has allowed reality to be bent to the will of its handlers, creating multiples that lead to multiple realities. Thus, images lost our trust to depict reality. Photography is no longer a reliable tool except to its user, and to those who believe in the merit of that user. So maybe, the power of the image has shifted back to the artist’s ability to use the medium of photography to depict reality.

It is the system of photography itself that is instrumental in asking the critical questions, and these questions, rather than the material that elevates the medium. Inherent in its use, photography has always reacted to both technology and science. Perhaps, having reached the edge of both, photography is moving towards a place where there is no longer a normal system, there is no order of operation, becoming a truly conceptual medium. And maybe, the material of photography is now only another simulacrum attempting to trigger multiple levels of memory in order to arrive at more malleable levels of engagement than the cold digital system that is the contemporary order of the day. If we, the users of the medium, continue to explore the ethos of photography, and its output continues to be dematerialized in digital form, where does that take us as a society and what is it that now constitutes a photographic object?

The Fulcrum Press

422 Ord St., Los Angeles, CA 90012