Continuing through April 10, 2010
The small images of nondescript places from series including \'Military Architecture,\' \'Long Beach,\' \'Desert,\' and \'San Bernardino\' are signature Judy Fiskin works. Since the mid-1970\'s she crisscrossed the Los Angles area making photographs of its vernacular image. These banal pictures, resonate way beyond their tiny scale. Each image is surrounded by a black border and sits in the middle of a white page, exquisitely framed. Individual images may be quite humorous or at times cutting. They almost never include people, so Los Angeles appears to be a desolate, depopulated place.
Each image is a precious find, something to be savored and looked upon over and over again. Fiskin stopped making photographs in the 1990s and turned to making video. Her latest is an 11 minute \'Guided Tour,\' a compilation of snippets from docent talks juxtaposed with images of both public art and traditional as well as contemporary works within museum walls. This ironic look at how art is explained uses non-art contexts to illustrate that what we see and what we hear about what we have seen often do not correspond.
