John Divola

Born in California in 1949, John Divola has disrupted traditional expectations about photography for the past forty years. Featuring six works from his 2008 series, Dark Star, this compact installation touches on the central themes of the artist’s practice, capturing Divola’s interventions — in this case, discs he spray painted on the walls of abandoned homes outside of Los Angeles — in a series of haunting images.

At once blatantly straightforward and disarmingly mysterious, the title Dark Star suggests an overpowering astronomical mass; a theoretical star whose gravitational force is so strong it traps the light it emits. By assigning these images sequential letters rather than titles (A, B, C . . . ), Divola further implies the sense of anonymous, distant suns, perhaps one of thousands catalogued by scientists at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, near his home in Southern California. Their shifting scale and position within each room amplify the curious sense of space, some constrained by closets, others expanding across empty walls, each “sun” differing in size and its distance from the camera. Dark Star F, with a small red “planet” seemingly locked into orbit, becomes a schematic solar system. For all of their mystery and foreboding, however, these photographs ultimately become meditative, the minimalist simplicity of Divola’s forms giving way to subtle variations of light and surface.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website