In the Cut

July 30 - September 24, 2016

1 of 26
  • Luisotti-2016-08-05_009
  • Luisotti-2016-08-05_003
  • Cindy Bernard, Diane and June, 2015
  • Cindy Bernard, Bus, 2015
  • Cindy Bernard, Beach, 2015
  • Luisotti-2016-08-05_005
  • Whitney Hubbs, Untitled (Horse), 2012
  • Luisotti-2016-08-05_002
  • Sam Contis, Branding, 2014
  • Sam Contis, Across the Valley, 2014
  • Sam Contis, Desert Landscape, 2015
  • Sam Contis, High Noon, 2014
  • Sam Contis, Shoeing, 2013
  • Sam Contis, Hold Down, 2014
  • Sam Contis, Jack, Reading, 2015
  • Sam Contis, Untitled (Greenest Grass is in the deepest mud), 2013
  • Luisotti-2016-08-05_006
  • Chelsea Mosher, Untitled, 2015
  • Chelsea Mosher, Trench, 2015
  • Mosher, Sprinkler Control, 2016
  • Chelsea Mosher, The Orange Blossom, 2015
  • Luisotti-2016-08-05_001
  • Luisotti-2016-08-05_007
  • Lisa Ohlweiler, Untitled, 2010
  • Lisa Ohlweiler, Paradise, 2009
  • Luisotti-2016-08-05_008

In the Cut

July 30 - September 24, 2016
Press Links:

Artforum

Dream Idea Machine

ForYourArt

LA Times

Paris Photo

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.


Cindy Bernard’s career spans three decades. Works by Bernard can been found in the collections of MOCA, LACMA, the Pompidou and MoMA, among others. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Harpo Foundation, California Community Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Japan, and was included in the Whitney and Lyon Biennials. Bernard works across several media including photography, video, performance and, most recently, painting. Current projects include Vinland, a meditation on the complex and continually shifting relationships between spaces, social and economic structures, and personal and collective histories and an “episodic” series based on the history of social nudism: Your Personal View of (Social) Nudism.

Sam Contis received her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from New York University. Upcoming exhibitions include a three-person show at the Fotomuseum Antwerp in Fall 2016. Portfolios of her work have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Capricious, and Blind Spot. Her work is in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She was recently awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship, and last year was a visiting critic at LCC, University of the Arts, London. Her first book will be published by MACK in 2017.

Whitney Hubbs received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles and BFA from California College of the Arts. Most recently, Hubbs had her first solo museum exhibition at the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside. Upcoming exhibitions include a four-person exhibition at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Fall 2016. Her work is held in the permanent collections of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Whitney Museum of American Art: Library, New York; The California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside; and The Riot Grrrl Collection, Fales Library Special Collections, New York University, New York. In Spring 2016, Blind Spot will publish the artist’s monograph, Body Doubles. Whitney Hubbs lives and works in Alfred, New York.

Chelsea Mosher received her MFA from California State University, Long Beach (2014) and her BA with Honors from Portland State University in Portland, OR. She has exhibited widely in the US; recent exhibitions include, Southland, Pehrspace, (Los Angeles, CA), Neither Here Nor There, The Dojo, (Culver City, CA), and Winter Pictures, Humble Arts Foundation (online exhibition). She is currently visiting faculty in photography at UCLA and CSULB. Mosher lives in Long Beach, CA.

Lisa Ohlweiler is an American artist whose photographic works explore formal analogies and photographic sequencing creating connections between seemingly disparate subjects. She received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MFA from the University of Southern California. Living and working in Los Angeles, CA, she has been strongly influenced by the southern California landscape, culture, film industry, and quality of light. Existing in a space between active engagement and cool observation, her photographs create an impression akin to the moment when a word used everyday suddenly becomes strange to the ear and demands to be contemplated as through it were heard for the first time.