SEASONS
Seasons is an artist-run contemporary photography gallery started in 2024 in Los Angeles, California. It is currently located at 422 Ord St on the 2nd Floor in Chinatown.
For more information contact
info@seasons-la.com or visit our instagram.
Seasons 01: Concrete Island
08/03-08/25 2024
Artists
Manal Abu-Shaheen
Peter Baker
Laura Bielau
Zach Callahan
Patrick Gookin
Heyward Hart
Anthony Hernandez
Mayumi Hosokura
Alan Huck
Shaniqwa Jarvis
Anne Lass
Lacey Lennon
Juan Orrantia
Yorgos Prinos
Josh Schaedel
Colin Patrick Smith
Chikara Umihara
Michael VahrenwaldPress Release
“The light outside was perfectly normal: it was the covering of concrete that had distorted it.” - JG Ballard
Seasons presents our inaugural group exhibition Concrete Island. Through photography, video & installation, this con-fluence of artists reflect on the physical & psychological conditions of the contemporary city. The title Concrete Island is taken from JG Ballard’s novel of urban crises, wherein an architect finds himself marooned on an embankment of con-
crete after a car accident. Separated by borders, oceans & time zones, what links these artists is their engagement with the asphalt of everyday life, navigating urban terrains from Los Angeles to New York, London to Berlin, Cape Town to Beirut to Tokyo. And while these respective cities have distinct features, Ballard’s fiction serves as an apt metaphor for this group of artists who work in relative isolation from one another, but coalesce through the practice of photography within the confines of the built environment.
While it is true that artists tend to live in cities for both opportunity & community, they must also contend with the ways in which the 21st century city has become, well, more Ballardian, that is to say; accelerated, privatized & re-vamped by technological developments. Shaped evermore conspicuously by consumer culture & imagery, fraught with the anxiety of obscene costs of living & tinted by subliminal fears, real or imagined. If “concrete has no mercy,” as Ballard wrote, then the gesture of photography can feel like an act of survival, one that these artists use to create a code of communication that is both evidently descriptive & tonally elegiac.