- Artist or Maker
- Lane Barden
United States, California, Los Angeles, born 1950 - Title
- View from Seventh Street Bridge
- Date Made
- 2018
- Medium
- Inkjet print (pigment based)
- Dimensions
- Primary support: 44 1/8 × 63 in. (112.08 × 160.02 cm)
Image: 38 × 57 in. (96.52 × 144.78 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2020.152.1
- Collecting Area
- Photography
- Curatorial Notes
Los Angeles−based Lane Barden has focused his practice on the hardscape, topography, and nature of the city’s infrastructure. In his series following the pathway of the Los Angeles River, the artist fully embraces and amplifies the nature of digital representation. Digital “corruption” or glitches are enhanced—horizon lines don’t match up, areas are incomplete or interrupted, color tones shift in midair—and the reality of present-day digital perception is front and center. His images of nearly vacant riverscapes, created in supersized format, can be seen as a twenty-first-century response to the grandly oversized and idealized views of the American landscape made by the Hudson River School painters of the early nineteenth century. In contrast, Barden’s images are not at all romanticized, but rather present some incompatible balance of bucolic and industrial. They are both sublime, in their quiet observation of this cemented, controlled natural resource, and cynical, in their view of the massive interference and dehumanizing effects of our desire to conquer nature. Barden’s photographs also capture illusive, not easily accessible views, requiring that he trespass onto river overpasses to gain entry.
Eve Schillo
2020/2024