Hollywood, Los Angeles
John Divola
Strange Resemblance
Château ShattoFor over five decades, John Divola (b. 1949) has affirmed his position as a defining conceptual voice in the discipline of photography, layering the medium with the gestures and conventions of installation, painting, video and sculpture. His photographs—both those which are exactingly constructed and those which are appropriated wholesale—engage the illusions which are inherent to both his chosen medium and the region of southern California. Divola’s first exhibition at Château Shatto, Strange Resemblance, assembles three bodies of work in which Divola’s photographic inquiry is focused on Hollywood, in the metonymic value: MGM (1979), Continuity (1995), and X-Files (2002). In the late 1970s, Divola completed MGM, a series of photographs capturing a decaying reproduction of New York City housed in the namesake studio’s Culver City backlot. The rickety simulacra of the sets are torn between the incoherent timelines and realities imposed by the various films that employed them; with a confounding interplay between the natural corrosion caused by the elements of southern California, and the deliberate, artificial entropy designed into them by production departments. Framed by these derelict vestiges of cinematic industry are whispers of a conversely developing urbanscape––concrete parking structures, municipal buildings and single-level tract housing––erected in the same vantage. The images embody the manner in which photographs, by design, arrest that which is evanescent. Continuity is Divola’s defining ingress into the territory of the readymade. The project comprises groupings of found photographs arranged by subject, primarily from the 1930s and 1940s. This vernacular of photography was originally developed by Warner Bros’ production department to trace visual features of a film’s set, so that linear continuity could be retained across different takes of the same scene. In many of these photographs, the chalkboard slate is visible, displaying the name and date of the production, opening up each image to other indications of artifice or folly, among these being incongruous light sources, exposed edges of sets, a boom microphone, and architectural features leading nowhere. Divola created X-Files after an invitation was extended to the artist to visit the set of the titular television series in its final year of production. At the time this opportunity arose, Divola was developing another idea to photograph the sites of miracles. The supernatural material of the television show—often depicting what could be classified as ‘miraculous’—offered a re-routing for the artist, whose practice is equally trained towards the notional and the circumstantial. Installed in concert, these three bodies articulate Divola’s precise conceptual maneuvers, affirmed by a profound handling of the technical elements that scaffold a photographic image. John Divola (b. 1949, Los Angeles, USA) is a photographer based in Riverside, California. Divola’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle Bern. Bern; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Tate Modern, London; Serralves Museum, Serralves; and Rijksmuseum, Enchede. Divola’s work is included in the collections of museums in the US and internationally, including Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Museum of Art, London; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Divola has delivered lectures and participated on panels at various universities and institutions, including Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Royal College, London; Yale, New Haven; Columbia University, New York; University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles; California Institute of Arts (CalArts), Valencia; and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.