In LA check out out Haphazard: Opening August 8th runs through Sept 20th.

 Haphazard is pleased to present a solo exhibition of photographs by Arpi Agdere titled “Punctum”. The body of work presented in this exhibition contains at its core an element that harkens back to a tradition at the origins of photography shared by William Henry Fox Talbot and Mathew Brady: the landscape. While landscape suggests the concerns of pictorialism – that is to make a photograph look like a painting - Agdere’s work is reminiscent with the work of other contemporary photographers who are concentrating on what is called the “social landscape”. Her images contain distinct signs of a caustic, suburban civilization that seems to be encroaching on the Southern California landscape that Agdere calls home. Two elements are at work in these pictures, first Agdere is a studio artist who uses photography and not a photographer per-se and the second is psychedelics. We see the photographic chemical effects redolent of an acid drenched psychedelic aesthetic that appears both chaotically random and highly composed. Agdere’s interpenetration of the SoCal landscape with psychedelic liquidity suggests a “social landscape” but one in existential crisis. The work seems to be still in its darkroom liquid state – in-media-res – a space both microcosmic and macrocosmic simultaneously; visually they are at the flash point of evaporating into fields of abstract chemical space of Martian reds, acid yellows and purple haze. This creates a sense of contingency and metamorphosis that allows both chance elements, and highly calculated composition
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