Custodial History is on view October 1st through November 9th at Lazy Eye Gallery at Yucca Valley Material Lab
A long-time art photographer in high demand, Ian Byers-Gamber has witnessed and documented the work of thousands of other Los Angeles artists. In Custodial History, he turns his gaze toward what is officially not pictured, to what fictions live parallel to the work and processes of the communities in and around which he lives and works. Taken at job sites, during shoots, or along the way, these uncanny photographs sit at the arc of departure from the creation of an interpreting document to the granting of entry into states of being that exist outside (and, often, within) the frame. Images of a grand piano stuffed with hay; an improbable figure suspended from a crane; the viscera of a demolished museum: these illuminate the systems of otherworldly juxtapositions that index artistic production in Los Angeles. What arrives from this collection is a sense of the “way before” and the “long after” of the existence of a shifting city, inventing and destroying to the hum of its low, whispering and strange currents. - Asher Hartman
