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.
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
Yangon's well loved Palace of Literature (via The Myanmar Times) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles October 3, 2018 The four storey yellow painted building with big masonry work of books in black and white pages for its motif loomed high at the corner of Merchant Road and 37th street...
7 Art Shows to See in New York, February 2024 Skip to content A detail of Apollinaria Broche’s “I Close My Eyes Then I Drift Away” (2023) at Marianne Boesky Gallery (photo Hrag Vartanian/ Hyperallergic ) The short month of February still packs a lot of art in New York City, from a survey of the influential Godzilla Asian American Arts Network to Apollinaria Broche’s whimsical ceramics and Aki Sasamoto’s experimentations with snail shells and Magic Erasers in her solo show at the Queens Museum...
Saturday, March 3 3pm to 4.30pm Exhibition Walkthrough of If These Stones Could Sing and Falling Wall , performance by Public Movement Curator Marie Martraire will lead a walkthrough of If These Stones Could Sing , a group show on view which focuses on the body as a site to engage the politics of public monuments...
End of 2008, Pierre Leguillon presented at KADIST, Paris the first retrospective of the works of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) organized in France since 1980, bringing together all the images commissioned to the New York photographer by the Anglo-American press in the 1960s...
450 Hayes Street (excavation site) by Marcelo Cidade is a large scale photograph documenting the artist’s excavation of a parking lot located at 450 Hayes Street in San Francisco, a former section of the city’s Central freeway and current condominium site...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with...
Drowned Wood Standing Coiled (2011) consists of two sculptures, inextricably linked...
Palo Enceba’o is a project by José Castrellón composed of three photographs, two drawings on metal, and a video work that creates a visual and cultural analogy between the events of January 9th, 1964 in Panama City and the game of palo encebado carried out in certain parts of Panama to celebrate the (US-backed) independence from Colombia...
The working processes of artists: Sabrina Poon | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles April 27, 2020 Singaporean filmmaker Sabrina Poon, better known as Spoon, talks about her work and the value of storytelling by breaking down three of her short films – Sylvia , Hello Uncle and Pa ...
Another America — AI-Generated Photos from the 1940s and 50s - AI-generated images by Phillip Toledano | Interview by Jim Casper | LensCulture Interview Another America — AI-Generated Photos from the 1940s and 50s Phil Toledano has often pushed the boundaries of photography to imagine the future; now he’s tapping into AI to create alternative histories, challenging our belief in any images at all...