In the Cut

Gallery Luisotti presents its summer group exhibition, In the Cut, curated by Michael Peña. The exhibition includes photographs by Cindy Bernard, Sam Contis, Whitney Hubbs, Chelsea Mosher, and Lisa Ohlweiler. Many of these works have never been on public view or are making an appearance in Southern California for the first time. The exhibition opens July 30, 2016 and runs through September 24, 2016. A reception in honor of the artists will be held at the gallery August 13, 2016 from six to eight in the evening.

The phrase “in the cut” speaks to physical isolation. As an idiom it refers to sites that are removed from dense populations, but also applies to places easily within reach, but perhaps less visited. In a more literal sense the phrase has bodily associations that the works in the show tease out in their arrangement within the gallery space. A wound or a mark, the cut also hints at a divide that can then be bridged. Despite the remote locales, interiority and intimacy are factored into the works as well.

The exhibition addresses the genre of landscape and questions its boundaries. It asks whether living bodies, human and otherwise, can have terrains of their own that echo or inform other views of primarily geological formations. Moreover, in what ways do landscapes work on the bodies within them or condition the viewer to see those bodies? Sites of investigation include a secluded college in the California desert, West Coast nudism camps, and Southern California beaches. The profile of a horse shuttles between flesh and an outcropping of granite rock. A ranch in Riverside is anthropomorphized via specific views of water-bearing channels and the claustrophobia of fallen citruses on the arid floor.

Cut, a plenitude spills out of the frame and into the open.