RICKY WEAVER, RYAN PEREZ

Long Distance 

June 29 - August 3, 2024

Projected by light or objectified in physical space, a photograph references a deictic position to outcomes that are relative to place and time. Since its advent, the photograph has been used publicly and privately as a means to distribute information via documentation — time and place (space), establishing cultural worth and exchangeable value. When making a photograph, if an outcome is valued as a reference point in time and space, how does the photographic document account for the active space of looking? The distance between here and there, or from there to there, when it appears to have collapsed in and on itself. 

The photographic phenomenon of depth of field engages distance and clarity through the lens's compression of space. In the relative comparison, clarity has a direct objective in its output, while distance, though measurable through the photographic device, enables the subjectivity of looking. What results when the photograph, as document and provocation, abstracts the distance between the lens and its subject? In many ways, this framework suggests that our desires are objectified and perceived as being the furthest away from us. In this exhibition, Ricky Weaver and Ryan Perez engage with concepts that invite a complex interplay of ideas that reference distance, solitude, and spirituality in looking. The artists share a dialogue with the camera’s social limitations of understanding time and space – and the possibilities within that. 

Perez presents images from three separate series and puts them into conversation: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, In the Way of Seeing Through, and The Music Box. These photographs reference the landscape through culturally shared histories and the artist’s subjectivity. Perez often takes photographs while running errands and driving around with his family, creating self-identified landmarks between the Inland Empire and the San Gabriel Valley. Perez often thinks about what it means to walk around this country with a camera; he brings up the time of Robert Frank and The Americans, another photographer grappling with the landscape while traveling with his family. This group of photographs acknowledges the disconnect between how Perez imagines the landscape and the experience of living in a matrix of social conditions and histories. Buried in these images are narratives of privilege, capitalism, war, settlement, unrest, life, and death.  

Ricky Weaver visits two important places in Puerto Rico that index cites/sights of fugitivity; Espiritu Santo, a waterfall in the El Yunque forest where an Elder was waiting for their cohort at the bridge and Castillo San Filipe Del Morro, a citadel commissioned by King Charles I, built by captured West Africans. Weaver is interested in provoking and challenging what possibilities remain in the wake of the abstracted distance created by the camera. Relying on the Meta-Archive to fill in the gaps between black and water and body and land and artifact and vessel and ancestor and ritual… Ricky intuitively responds to these photographs through objects that signify and incite a method of looking that requires the whole body. 

Ryan Perez (Oceanside, CA. 1982) has exhibited at sites including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Sweeney Art Gallery, UC Riverside, The California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA; Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico; C24 Gallery, NY, NY; Steve Turner Gallery, LA, CA; Samuel Freeman Gallery, LA, CA; Fulcrum Press, LA, CA; Control Room, LA, CA; and The Brand Library Art Gallery, Glendale, CA. Perez lives and works with his family in Monrovia, California, and is an Associate Professor at ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA.

Ricky Weaver is an image-based Artist from Ypsilanti, MI. Her object-oriented practice allows space for theorizing images in a way that extends beyond the photograph. Her practice interrogates how body, hymn, scripture, and the everyday appear as image and how that image functions as both archive and vessel. Weaver has exhibited her work in the US and abroad including fairs such as ParisPhoto, EXPO Chicago, and Art Miami, among others. Weaver received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2018  and a BFA from Eastern Michigan University in 2014. She has been awarded opportunities such as The Independent Scholar Fellowship at The Carr Center Detroit and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities exhibition and fellowship award. Her work has been acquired by institutions including the Black Studies Gallery at UT Austin, The Detroit Institute of Arts, and The Wedge Collection.