Toward a Hyperreality is a body of work about urban space, its consequences, and the shifting identity of the contemporary American city. For the past decade, I have been photographing the proclaimed city centers of downtown Los Angeles and Paradise, Nevada—better known as the Las Vegas Strip—and what I see as the socio-spatial schism of the built environment. The work is an interplay between reality and fiction, posing questions about progress, technology, consumerism, socio-economic disparities, and the human dramas that unfold in the contemporary social landscape. The title Toward a Hyperreality is meant to echo Toward A Social Landscape, a seminal 1960’s photography exhibition and book which, along with New Documents, sought to reframe a kind of documentary style. The history of twentieth-century photography is rich with images portraying the streets of American cities as a public stage, suggesting authenticity and capturing spontaneous human gestures in the flow of daily life. By the 1980s and ‘90s, many artists aimed to subvert those notions by intervening or consciously staging their pictures to various degrees. As a student of the medium, all of these movements have greatly informed my work. But as a photographer of the twenty-first century, my work doesn’t aim merely to question the street as a democratic social space—it describes a landscape increasingly constructed to create the illusion of a shared reality, while perpetuating the erasure of the public realm. In this sense, today’s social landscape invites us to enter an image where we perform our public selves, while our experiences are mediated all around us.
A common misconception about the theory of hyperreality is that it applies to conspicuously artificial places like Disneyland. We imagine that once we exit the spectacle, or put our devices back into our pockets, we re-enter the “real” world. But my practice stems from a feeling that the duplicity of the social landscape is hiding in plain sight— that architecture and facades act as emblems of power and ideology— concealing labor, history, and even violence. In my photographs hyperreality resembles a more subtle, poetic condition— where facts clearly described come under suspicion, qualities of light shape an unsettling beauty, and unfamiliar zones come to pass for the norm.
Seasons 09: Toward a Hyperreality on view April 25 - June 6, 2026 / 422 Ord St. 2nd Floor Los Angeles, CA 90012
