The Lodge and independent curator Audrey Landreth are pleased to present David Black: Cerro Gordo.
Timed closely to the publication of David Black's first monograph, Cerro Gordo by Hat & Beard Press, (December 2016), this exhibition of fourteen large format prints is David Black’s first exhibition at The Lodge.
Located on the edge of Death Valley, Cerro Gordo is a ghost town that was once the greatest producer of silver in California. In the early 20th century, Eastman Kodak used the silver mined at Cerro Gordo to manufacture early motion picture film stock. The film was then utilized by an emerging Hollywood to capture the most popular genre of the time: Westerns. Western films were then exported all over the world and used to define a vision of the West.
For photographer David Black, Cerro Gordo is a steep, windy street in Echo Park, where he lived during the years that the work for this exhibition was made. After the death of his father in 2014, it was on this street that Black experienced both love and heartbreak. During restless nights and aimless drives through the streets of Los Angeles, these images came to him, and he followed them to actualization over the course of two years. The selection of work on view is a powerful showcase of vivid and plaintive visions of Los Angeles, and the paradoxical duality of the West. Cerro Gordo celebrates both the light and the shadow that sculpt the city's singular sprawl: the mechanical monsters that populate the oil fields; the cool cars that heat up the streets; the atmospheric haze that permeates all like a melancholic daydream; its unrelenting highways; its autopsied landscape; its diverse voices holding out for hope, and its steady stream of cowboys longing for the drea
Exhibit runs through January 22, 2017.