Book Room
85 7 20
November 16 - December 22, 2024
“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
“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 ClubMay 11 - June 15, 2024
Taylor Galloway
Yoko Ikeda
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.