Photography (Photography)

San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel. California Stories: Attempt to correlate social class with elevation above main harbor channel (San Pedro, July 1975) (1973–2011) is a series of coupled gelatin silver prints that show the artist using his hand to measure the elevation of various pieces of real estate, ranging from a manicured mansion to a ramshackle beach house. A direct equation becomes evident between the social strata these homes represent and the height at which the artist holds his hand.

Photography (Photography)

LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel. His photograph of this throwaway object calls back the body, and the handprint is in fact his own right hand; thus the piece can function as a self-portrait of the artist, in an ironic twist on the art historical genre.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape. As the video progresses, however, a disembodied hand begins to move these forms, animating a pictorial frame that was previously still. The hand – ostensibly the “arranger” of the works title – functions as a metonym of the artist’s hand, quite literally bringing a motionless work to life.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Fabiola Torres-Alzaga plays with magic, illusion, and sleight-of-hand, fabricating installations, drawings, and films that toy with our perceptions. Her interests and the resulting aesthetic projects seem couched in the 19thcentury sideshow, more than the contemporary art world. In her delicate drawings, Adaptando la Carta, layers of tracing paper reveal different hand positions, concealing and revealing a playing card hidden among the curves of the magician’s hand.

Photography (Photography)

Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California. Taken outside Palmdale, Littlerock, Pearlblossom, Victorville, and Barstow, towns where the population does not exceed 20,000, Ruppersberg’s trip follows the outskirts of Los Angeles. As with many of his other photographic series, the artist here inserted into each view a constant element that disturbs the otherwise quiet scenes: a hand holding an open magazine.