Jake Longstreth at ltd los angeles

Artist: Jake Longstreth

Exhibition title: Carbon Canyon

Venue: ltd los angeles, Los Angeles, US

Date: May 29 – July 30, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and ltd los angeles

ltd los angeles is pleased to announce Carbon Canyon, Jake Longstreth’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Longstreth will present seven new large scale paintings.

“I met Jake Longstreth when I was preparing research for an exhibition on the shifting material grounds of the anthropocene. His Particulate Matter series posed a particularly brilliant response to this question—the state of aesthetics and ecology—in that it transforms the changing material conditions the artist has to work with today (in his practice and in the world at large) into both fodder for and output of his studio practice. His diminutive paintings of the horizon seem innocent, almost naive, but seductive shifts in color turn out to be based in a technical (if poetic) analysis of the changing composition of the atmosphere. That a project like this one should be tied to Los Angeles makes intuitive sense, given both the region’s legacy as the “infrastructural city” (the cover of Kazys Varnelis’s book of the same title is a cell tower disguised as a palm tree), a place rebuilt for human habitation with concrete, oil, and networks, and the history of artists working with the modular nature of its urban landscape. Longstreth’s paintings are like the Twentysix Gasoline Stations of the hills and, completing the circle, they capture the environmental effects of the new cultural and economic groundswell that Ruscha sensed coming some half century prior. Each picture—sky meets terrain, nothing more—is a portrait of now, a highly specific space and time based on the conditions of seeing. With Carbon Canyon, the philosophical and aesthetic vibe of Particulate Matter is scaled up considerably: the factors that go into the composition of a place are broken down and rebuilt stroke by stroke. The horizon line moves slightly upwards along the picture plane, a gaze lowered in order to better consider the relationship between what sends things up and what might never come down.”

– Robin Peckham

Jake Longstreth graduated with an MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. He was the 2008 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a 2007 Artist in Residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Longstreth has been featured in Art in America, Artforum, Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, amongst others. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.