Untitled (Pulling Cart)
2016 - NFT (NFT)
Gregory Halpern
Gregory Halpern spent five years shooting ZZYZX , and another year editing the results, from an estimated thousand rolls of film, about half of which were shot in the final year after his Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to live in California. According to Halpern, the series “is grounded in reality, but it occupies an in-between space, between documentary and a certain sense of mystery.” …“I see ZZYZX as part of a continuum but edging a little closer towards fiction.” The series title is borrowed from the village Zzyzx (pronounced zye-zix), formerly Soda Springs, but rechristened by the mineral water pioneer, Curtis Howe Springer, in 1944. The eccentric Springer named it after what he claimed to be the last word in the English language. The images in the ZZYZX series begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and drift west, through the city, and finally end at the Pacific ocean. This general westward movement is a pilgrimage toward the ocean, and alludes to the manifest expansion of America from east to west. The people, places, and animals in the series did appear before Halpern’s camera, but he has selected and organized the images into a work of fiction or fantasy, with assistance from artist Jason Fulford on the sequence. The work brings together seemingly disparate images of environmental crisis, kinship, entertainment, urbanity, and stunning vistas. There is a strange narrative harmony to the series—the sublime, the psychedelic, and the self-destructive. Southern California is unpredictable, wild. Cultures and histories coexist, the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing, and all under the golden state’s radiant light, as transcendent as it is brutal.
Gregory Halpern is an acclaimed American photographer whose practice is predicated on wandering. Combined with a curiosity about the elusive qualities of Americanness, he makes images that mix documentary and fiction. He has been celebrated for his pioneering photobooks, which involve rich colors, thoughtful sequencing, and evocative associations between images as a form of storytelling.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » KADIST
Zhang Kechun
2020Zhang Kechun’s photographic series The Yellow River documents the effects of modernization along the eponymous Yellow River, the second longest in Asia...
© » KADIST
Chris Huen Sin-Kan
2013Contrast to the bustling and unrelenting experience of a city such as Hong Kong, Chris Huen Sin Kan paints the tranquil interiors of his apartment, where he leads a modest and almost hermit-like life...
© » KADIST
Nikita Kadan
2018East of Ukraine became a place of armed conflict with Russia-backed separatists, who proclaimed parts of (the) Donetsk and Lughansk oblast (administrative region in Ukrainian) to be ‘People’s republics’...
© » KADIST
Moshekwa Langa
2006In “Untitled II (Mapping text)”, 2009, Langa abstracts language in an attempt to change the familiar into the absurd...
© » KADIST
Kelly Sinnapah Mary
2021Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...
© » KADIST
Online Seminar: Frequencies of Tradition With Anselm Franke, Ho Tzu Nyen, Chia Wei Hsu, Yuk Hui, siren eun young jung, Jane Jin Kaisen, Ayoung Kim, Hyunjin Kim, Hwayeon Nam, Emily Wilcox, and Soo Ryon Yoon The Times Museum and KADIST present three online sessions that consider tradition as a contested space, where one can critically reflect on Asian modernization and the Western canon...
© » KADIST
Simon Starling
2007Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...
© » KADIST
Newell Harry
2015(Untitled) Nimoa and Me: Kiriwina Notations by Newell Harry brings together a litany of contemporary politics—mobilization around enduring racism, the legacies of Indigenous and independence struggle, and the prospects of global solidarity against neocolonialism and social injustice...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Q&A: AO Show Creative Director Tuan Le Had a Vision for Performance Art in Vietnam (via Saigoneer) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles September 13, 2018 Some may say that modern performance art in Vietnam looks the way it does thanks to the works of Tuan Le and his colleagues...
© » KADIST
Tirdad Hashemi
2022The Blue Poisoning series , reveals the outcome of artist Tirdad Hashemi’s weary and depressed days in the winter of 2022, following their second migration from Paris to Berlin...