Grant Rusk
dal 8/9/2005 al 11/11/2005
Segnalato da
8/9/2005
Grant Rusk
Michael Dawson Gallery, Los Angeles
Hillside Living, Los Angeles Photographs, 1979-1980. The photographyes focused on the rapid and oftentimes impersonal transformation of the Southern California landscape stimulated by an unprecedented boom in commercial and residential construction. The artist examines various large-scale residential projects.
Hillside Living, Los Angeles Photographs, 1979-1980
''Certainly Los Angeles is a visually stimulating place and I continue to be
amazed by its appearance / events even after thirty-five years of rubbing up
against it. On the surface, and I suppose below it as well, one senses
indolence, mild hedonism and a feeling of general excessiveness. These
factors, however, seem not to divert us unusually and contribute to a viable
psychic environment. In my mind, artistic production is a unique mixture of
subjective indulgence and personal discipline and Los Angeles provides an
interestingly bizarre scale on which to test the weights of an appropriate
balance.''
--Robert Heinecken, 1976
Michael Dawson Gallery is pleased to present a selection of vintage
photographs by Grant Rusk. Rusk came of age as a photographer in the early
1970s, when the importance and meaning of photography as a fine art was
widely debated in the art world. Through the establishment of several
important graduate programs in fine art photography at the University of
California's Los Angeles and Irvine campus as well as the California
Institute of the Arts and California State University, Fullerton, Southern
California began to attract national and international attention for the
diversity of photo based artwork produced in the region. Rusk was deeply
influenced by an approach to landscape photography developed in Southern
California that came to be known as 'New Topographics'.
Championed by Lewis Baltz and others, this style of photography focused on
the rapid and oftentimes impersonal transformation of the Southern
California landscape stimulated by an unprecedented boom in commercial and
residential construction. Rusk¹s Hillside Living series examines various
large-scale residential projects in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel
mountain ranges from Malibu to Pomona. Rusk¹s austere and haunting
photographs of carved hillsides and the imposing support structure of
hillside construction ask the viewer to question the implication of this
development for the environment of Southern California.
Opening reception: Friday, September 9, 7-9 p.m.
Michael Dawson Gallery
535 North Larchmont Boulevard, Los Angeles, California