Concrete Island
Concrete Island is a group show concept I co-curated & participated in as part of the launch of Seasons LA, an artist-run gallery I work with, now located in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.
“The light outside was perfectly normal: it was the covering of concrete that had distorted it.”
- JG Ballard
Seasons presents our inaugural group exhibition Concrete Island. Through photography, video & installation, this confluence of artists reflect on the physical & psychological conditions of the contemporary city. The title Concrete Island is taken from JG Ballard’s novel of urban crises, wherein an architect finds himself marooned on an embankment of concrete after a car accident. Separated by borders, oceans & time zones, what links these artists is their engagement with the asphalt of everyday life, navigating urban terrains from Los Angeles to New York, London to Berlin, Cape Town to Beirut to Tokyo. And while these respective cities have distinct features, Ballard’s fiction serves as an apt metaphor for this group of artists who work in relative isolation from one another, but coalesce through the practice of photography within the confines of the built environment.
While it is true that artists tend to live in cities for both opportunity & community, they must also contend with the ways in which the 21st century city has become, well, more Ballardian, that is to say; accelerated, privatized & revamped by technological developments. Shaped evermore conspicuously by consumer culture & imagery, fraught with the anxiety of obscene costs of living & tinted by subliminal fears, real or imagined. If “concrete has no mercy,” as Ballard wrote, then the gesture of photography can feel like an act of survival, one that these artists use to create a code of communication that is both evidently descriptive & tonally elegiac.
Artist’s featured: Manal Abu-Shaheen, Peter Baker, Laura Bielau, Zach Callahan, Patrick Gookin, Heyward Hart, Anthony Hernandez, Mayumi Hosokura, Alan Huck, Shaniqwa Jarvis, Anne Lass, Lacey Lennon, Juan Orrantia, Yorgos Prinos, Josh Schaedel, Colin Patrick Smith, Chikara Umihara, Michael Vahrenwald.
August 3 - 25, 2024