Haphazard Gallery on Sawtelle Blvd. — “a contemplative space for contemporary art and design” — has a new trippy exhibition from emerging photographer Arpi Agdere.
The artist’s solo exhibit is reminiscent with the work of other contemporary photographers who are concentrating on what is called the “social landscape.” Her images contain distinct signs of a caustic, suburban civilization that seems to be encroaching on the Southern California landscape that Agdere calls home.
Two elements are at work in these pictures, first Agdere is a studio artist who uses photography and not a photographer per-se and the second is psychedelics. We see the photographic chemical effects redolent of an acid drenched psychedelic aesthetic that appears both chaotically random and highly composed. Agdere’s interpenetration of the SoCal landscape with psychedelic liquidity suggests a “social landscape” but one in existential crisis. The work seems to be still in its darkroom liquid state – in-media-res – a space both microcosmic and macrocosmic simultaneously; visually they are at the flash point of evaporating into fields of abstract chemical space of Martian reds, acid yellows and purple haze.
The black hole that figures prominently in the images owes its origin to early 20th century when photographic negatives were often destroyed by punching a hole through them with a paper puncher and then carefully archived. This strange act was performed on thousands of negatives from the Farm Security Administration that were deemed unfit or not usable by administrators, such as Roy Stryker who supervised the Information Division. Agdere deploys the same “negation” but now treated as a sign – in effect working in counterpoint with the psychedelic colors to create a polyphonic orchestration of signs and images that beautifully take us into the “punctum,” that is the title of the exhibition.
Agdere’s landscape is punctuated with the horror of place and the nostalgia for another. The escape velocity for Agdere seems to be located on the same planet whose landscape is strangely mundane and alien, full of things familiar and strange, and full of wonder and wound.
Haphazard is located at 1543 Sawtelle Blvd. and open Tuesday–Saturday 1–7 pm.
For more information visit www.haphazard.co or call 213.610.4110.
