Ray Barbee
Rarely without his Leica M6, Barbee brings the same unique perspective to the art of black and white film photography that he has brought to skateboarding over the past 30 years. Known for his freestyle skateboarding talents, Ray Barbee is a self-proclaimed "Jack of all Trades, Master of None." Barbee's exposure to the skateboarding world created his passion for photography and approach to capturing the world around him.
Amir Zaki
Empty Vessel – Amir Zaki presents two new bodies of photographs by Amir Zaki featuring either vacant landscapes of California skateparks or still lifes of shards from broken, ceramic containers. The shards are clearly from earthenware pots, but both subjects are “vessels” in that the skateparks are sunken into the clay of the earth. Hung in proximity to one another, sometimes juxtaposed, the images generate a complex conversation around the notion of “emptiness,” which includes removing presuppositions from one’s mind about what one is about to experience, is experiencing, or has experienced. By disentangling the mind of one’s own stories and worries, one can be open to other possibilities presented by perception itself. Thus Zaki’s Empty Vessel, as an exhibition, provides a platform for contemplating duality and the more ambiguous third space that exists between linked elements which cannot exist without each other: form and emptiness; function and aesthetics; holding and letting go; containing and emptying.
Empty Vessel – Amir Zaki is accompanied by Zaki's first internationally distributed monograph, “California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks,” published by Merrell Publishers, with essays by the artist, famed skateboarder Tony Hawk, and Los Angeles-based architect Peter Zellner.
Empty Vessel—Amir Zaki was originally organized by the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, Orange Coast College, and curated by Tyler Stallings, director at The Doyle. Lead sponsorship of the exhibition at UCR ARTS is provided by UCR College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the City of Riverside.
Facing Fire
Art, Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the New West
Fire as omen and elemental force, as metaphor and searing personal experience -- these are the subjects explored by the artists of Facing Fire. California's diverse ecologies are fire-prone, fire-adapted, even fire-dependent. In the past two decades, however, West Coast wildfires have exploded in scale and severity. There is a powerful consensus that we have entered a new era. The artists of Facing Fire bring us incendiary work from active fire lines and psychic burn zones. They face fire, sift its aftermath, and struggle with the implications.
Image: Noah Berger, Photographer Justin Sullivan shooting low during the Camp Fire, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Scenes from the Collection: Trains
Scenes from the Collection is a new series highlighting thematic subjects found within the California Museum of Photography’s collections. The inaugural exhibition features photographs of trains. Spanning over 100 years of imagery, these photographs celebrate the power of trains and their infrastructure, showing both mundane and milestone scenes. Artists featured include Fred Archer, Walker Evans, William Henry Jackson, Paul Strand, Willard Worden, and Vida Yovanovich.
Color Shift
Photography has had a tumultuous relationship with color since its invention. Early photographers employed colorists to tint images with surrogacy for the missing color; inconsistent color sensitivity affected the way objects were depicted even in monochromes. Fleeting and erratic color dyes shifted C-prints in a matter of decades, or even years. Color Shift draws from the California Museum of Photography's extensive collection to explore the many ways in which we encounter color in photography, from the added to the actual.
Image: Olindo Ceccarini, Joan Crawford holding color control bar, 1930, digital composite from tri-color separation negatives, collection of the California Museum of Photography, gift of Olindo O. Ceccarini.