Itineraries    Jul 10 - Aug 28, 2004

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition Itineraries, curated by Chris Balaschak. Itineraries features nine artists - Edgar Arceneaux, Shannon Ebner, Andrew Freeman, Stephen Hilger, Myung Hwan Lim, Albert Ortega, Arthur Ou, Christina Ray, Kerry Tribe - each addressing greater Los Angeles as a landscape of commuting individuals. Fraught with freeways, congestion, and extended durations spent inside the car, the public space of Los Angeles breaks down into individual, internal perceptions. In tracing commutes, the constant movements across the city, we are left with itineraries. These itinerant lines expose the individual narratives of the city. Los Angeles is a web-form of narratives, where intersecting lines are open exchanges of different urban perceptions. Itineraries explores a Los Angeles where commuting is the individual movement through the city, the narratives those lines leave, and the exchange of these experiences that form communal identities within the city.

Itineraries draws its name from the two-fold definition of commuting; an exchange and a movement, of lines traveled and places experienced. The individualist nature of greater Los Angeles is exemplified in Kerry Tribe’s North is West / South is East, in which Kerry asked individuals to draw their map of Los Angeles upon arriving at LAX. Each map produces vastly different urban forms, exemplifying the multitude of disparate narratives that create the city. Also presented in book form is Edgar Arceneaux’s 107th St. Watts that, like Kerry’s, is an intersection of perspectives. Displacing the linearity of Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 107th St. is a circular journey around the Watts Towers, revealing the communal relations the space signifies through photographs and recollections. Christina Ray similarly expands upon her father’s experiences in Los Angeles. Transcribing into drawings the photographs her father has taken of his parking spots, Christina’s project follows her father’s lines and retraces his Los Angeles. Arthur Ou likewise forms personal monuments in photographing spaces of Monterey Park where he meets his father. Arthur then transfers his father’s comments about the image to the photograph, cutting letters out in a meticulously generic font. While the photographs convey seemingly banal scenes, the insertion of the text invokes a space of communal involvement and shared experience.

For Itineraries, Shannon Ebner has photographed ten people, each wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with a single letter and brought together to spell SELF IGNITE. With this intersection of commuting bodies, Shannon reveals the politic of an urban form as a space of alienated protest. In this manner of delineating a community, photographer Stephen Hilger and sound artist Albert Ortega collaborate in an enmeshing of aural environment and topographical imagery, highlighting points of intersecting identity within a landscape of residual labor. Their work passes us through fragmented urban pastorals, such as Elysian Park or Chavez Ravine, finding in these spaces little refuge from the commute blur of greater Los Angeles. This is echoed in Stephen’s own photography, which describes the intersection of domesticity and labor (opposing end points of a commute) converging in the back alleys of Beverly Hills. As the individual line awaits clarity through an exchange with other bodies, Myung Hwan Lim captures a full block radius on a single frame while driving through Korea Town. The 24 minute exposure fluctuates between blurring periphery and lucid moments of façade. The blur struggles for clarity as Myung Hwan captures his distance and desire for the facades behind which community congregates. The distance between individuals, and that of literal driving, is found in Andrew Freeman’s work. Andrew’s four images of insulating interiors, of home and car, accompany a text underlining the frustrations of the commute; the fatalism of life isolated on the freeway.

In moving through greater Los Angeles, in that common commute-space of home to work and back again, individuals weave their own narrative of the city. Greater Los Angeles is this web-like complex of infinite lines designating private narratives. Where these lines meet in exchange, itineraries are the infrastructure of communal identity. Only through the intersection of another’s lines is one anchored in the fluctuating form of Los Angeles. Without intersection the vastness of the web is hidden, as are the potential perspectives from which one can define the city. The differing narratives between individuals here become a solid foundation, the tensile lines in a spider’s web.

Itineraries opens July 10, reception 6-8 pm

Gallery Luisotti is located in Bergamot Station at 2525 Michigan Ave., Bldg. A2, Santa Monica. Contact us at (310) 453 0043 or rampub@gte.net