Chris Engman
Installation View of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles at Paris Photo LA
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce our participation in Paris Photo Los Angeles 2015 at Paramount Pictures Studios. The gallery will be presenting new and recent works by Kate Bonner, Chris Engman, Lia Halloran, and James Hyde.
Kate Bonner and Chris Engman treat the photograph as both an object and a process with the ability to engage and manipulate physical reality. In this sense, the photograph is not simply an object on a wall, in space—delineated by its own edges and singular surface—but an active agent with the capacity to shape the physical space in and around it. It moves beyond its exclusive nature whose purpose is to capture a moment vis a vis an image representing or mirroring a real-world object “frozen in time”, to a condition and function of that very reality. By inverting the primacy of the image and subverting the narrative aspect of photography, Bonner and Engman’s work explores new territory in the photography-sculpture relationship—not simply by the way in which the photograph affects our experience of the image but in the experience of the physical environment that it engages and controls.
James Hyde is an influential and respected contemporary artist who often employs unconventional materials when painting that range from plaster, nylon, chrome, and steel to styrofoam, glass, and more recently, photography. His practice has been described as an "exploration of physicality" in his experimentations with different textures and planes that often re-evaluate and expand the limits and boundaries of painting. Hyde uses the flat field of painting as a topological arena that ties together the physical substance of painting and the ground on which it is laid, extracting spatial dimensions and new meanings from this relationship. In his recent works, he utilizes abstraction to break photography’s semantic hold on the way we construct an image of the world.
In addition, the gallery will present new photographs by Lia Halloran that explore performance and perception of time in architectural environments. With a light strapped to her body, Halloran skateboards late at night in deserted locations around Los Angeles and uses time-lapse photography to capture the dynamic motion of light as she navigates sites like the L.A. riverbed, Bronson Canyon, Griffith Park and assorted east L.A. parking lots. Because of the long exposure, Halloran disappears, leaving only her luminous skate lines as traces of her presence. Thus, light not only reveals the natural world, but also conceals it. In doing so, she brings together art and science as two equally wondrous and fallible systems of knowledge.
