Walead Beshty: Passages

Opening reception: March 21, 7-9pm Exhibition walk-through with Walead Beshty and Aram Moshayedi: March 21, 6pm

LAXART PRESENTS LOS ANGELES-BASED ARTIST WALEAD BESHTY'S PASSAGES, A SERIES OF PHOTOGRAPHS, A SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION, AND A PUBLIC BILLBOARD

LAXART is pleased to present a series of projects by Los Angeles-based artist Walead Beshty. The exhibition Passages--comprised of a suite of photographs, a site-specific architectural intervention, a cinematic work, and a public billboard on La Cienega Boulevard--represents eight years of ongoing research into the relationships between the technological image and modernity's transitory and indeterminate spaces. Each avenue of Passages offers a distinct iteration of themes related to the traffic of images, hinging upon their spatial, representational, and material functions in contexts defined by movement and transition.

Included in LAXART's main gallery is a series of photographs Beshty produced by passing unused film through airport x-ray machines. The photographs from this series index their own traffic in washes of color and line, offering images of the limbo of air travel which directly represent these sites while resisting wrote pictorial depiction of conventional photographic imagery.

In LAXART's Project Space, Beshty has installed a work that employs cinematic forms and pictorial imagery. American Passages (2001-) is comprised of an expanding collection of photographs gathered over an eight-year period. This work, centered around the architectural styles of defunct regional shopping centers throughout the country, further engages questions of public space, collective memory, and the role of photography in the comprehension and construction of the American landscape. American Passages provides an archaeology of a building type in the process of disappearance, a condition that is echoed in its interwoven dissolving imagery of emptied and derelict shopping centers. LAXART will also produce a forthcoming collection of this work titled American Passages (2000-2009) as part of LAXART's publication series.

In addition, Beshty has installed a mirrored floor of shatter-proof architectural glass that runs throughout the installations and into LAXART's offices and lobby space, framing the exhibition, its architecture, and the works it includes, along with the quotidian activities of the exhibition space itself.

Walead Beshty: Passages is made possible with the generous support of LAXART's Producers Council chair Adam Nathanson.

Walead Beshty: Passages