Installation view of New Builds at Josh Lilley, presenting Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon
Installation view of New Builds at Josh Lilley, presenting Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon
Installation view of New Builds at Josh Lilley, presenting Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon
Installation view of New Builds at Josh Lilley, presenting Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon
Installation view of New Builds at Josh Lilley, presenting Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon
Installation view of New Builds at Josh Lilley, presenting Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon
Installation view of New Builds at Josh Lilley, presenting Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon
Installation view of New Builds at Josh Lilley, presenting Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon
Installation view of New Builds at Josh Lilley, presenting Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon
Installation view of New Builds at Josh Lilley, presenting Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon

Artworks

Reclining by Matt Lipps, 2015
Flowers by Matt Lipps, 2015
Cacti by John Houck, 2015
Gimme by Anthony Lepore, 2015
Fruit and Colocasia by Daniel Gordon, 2015
Gold Cup by Anthony Lepore, 2015
Squish by Anthony Lepore, 2015
Bone-white Eye by John Houck, 2015
Industrial Arts by John Houck, 2015

New Builds

Matt Lipps, Anthony Lepore, John Houck & Daniel Gordon

22 January – 3 March 2016

New Builds is an exhibition of four American artists who compress sculptural, painterly and collage instincts into photographic space.

Daniel Gordon photographs elaborate still lifes in vibrating patterns. Pitchers, fruit and flowers are built from photographs of pitchers, fruit and flowers, then built into studio sets. The scenes are tuned in Photoshop for heightened effect, reaching toward pure graphics at times, while the crunch of the paper seam always remains, keeping the hand present and the exotic space physical. Matt Lipps three-dimensional collages of archival photographic reproductions create expansive new taxonomies of visual culture, precisely staged and lit, scholarly but brimming with narrative. In John Houck's iterative History of Graph Paper works photography combines with rephotography, making reproductions share the frame with their subjects, generating uncanny, dreamy space that has experienced no digital manipulation. Anthony Lepore created a studio inside his father's bikini factory in Los Angeles, developing from there an ongoing series of photographs that reflect on the processes of manufacturing, the banality of labor, the creation of fantasy and the (sometimes literal) ties that bind.

New Builds is conceived as a photography exhibition that breathes, flexing around the idea of the rectangle pigmented with chemicals. It is a show about contemporary image-making that does not fixate on the implications of the screen and dematerialisation of photographic imagery, but instead chews on the material and the object, the stuff of photography. Philosophically these artists take the approach that object and material lead into concept, not the other way round. New Builds invites discussion about the contemporary photograph in the physical world rather than the contemporary photograph's relationship to virtual space.

Anthony Lepore – Born 1977 in Burbank, California. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Lepore received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2005. His work is in prominent museum collections including the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Daniel Gordon – Born 1980 in Boston, Massachusetts. Lives and works in New York.
Gordon received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2006. He was included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York, 2010, and New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009. His work is in prominent museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

John Houck – Born 1977 in South Dakota. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Houck received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. He was recently included in Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work is in prominent museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Matt Lipps – Born 1975 in California. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Lipps received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, in 2004. His work is in prominent museum collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.