November 9 - December 21, 2024

Like a generation of Southern California artists before them, William Camargo, Jackie Castillo and Julie Shafer operate at the intersection of art, politics and photography. But unlike their predecessors—the 1970s era San Diego photo-conceptualists spring to mind—this younger cohort proceeds with a different and perhaps more contemporary understanding of these three key terms.

William Camargo sometimes situates his “own brown body,” as he puts it, in the center of a surveillance economy now operating at a scale that could scarcely have been imagined a generation ago; this action and others like it resulting in a series of lens-based artworks so charming as to effectively disarm their malign implications. Jackie Castillo widens the category of “the political” to include the volatile Southern California real estate economy from which her own often large scale and immersive photo constructions extract a darkly ominous beauty. And Julie Shafer’s notably straight, cool and documentary images of “transportation,” so to speak, mask an explosive subtext that forces a long overdue reconsideration of this quintessentially Southern California theme.

Together, these three early-career artists provide a timely reminder that the political and the aesthetic are not necessarily antagonistic elements—the one coming inevitably at the expense of the other—but can be sometimes, as here, locked in a tender embrace.