PHOTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA'S BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Southern California’s built environment is in a constant state of flux—a landscape defined by expansion, erasure, reinvention and decay. This exhibition brings together artists from Laguna Art Museum’s permanent collection who have engaged deeply with themes of urbanization, infrastructure, environmental transformation and conceptual interpretations of space. Rather than presenting a wide survey, this exhibition offers an in-depth exploration of artists with multiple works in the collection, allowing for a richer, more layered engagement with their investigations of land-use and development.

The selected artists form a complex dialogue about the shifting nature of the built environment, with some taking a documentary approach, while others deconstruct, abstract or intervene in the spaces they depict. Through stark realism, conceptual play and aesthetic manipulation, these artists reveal the ever-evolving story of Southern California’s relationship with land.

The exhibition features the work of Lewis Baltz, Jeff Brouws, Laurie Brown, Luke Erickson, Jacques Garnier, Marcia Hafif, John Humble, Barbara Kasten, Jeremy Kidd, Tom Lamb, The Legacy Group, Deborah Oropallo, Julius Shulman and Robert von Sternberg.

Eternal Construction: Photographic Perspectives on Southern California’s Built Environment is organized by Laguna Art Museum and guest curated by Tyler Stallings. Support is provided by Mike Johnson and Taka Oiwa.

About the Curator

Tyler Stallings is a curator, writer, and researcher based in Southern California. From 1999 to 2006, Stallings served as chief curator at Laguna Art Museum, where he curated and co-curated groundbreaking exhibitions, most accompanied by books that contributed to scholarship in their respective fields, such as Sandow Birk’s “In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from The Great War of Californias” (2000), Struggle: The Art of Szukalski (2000, co-curator), Laurie Brown: Recent Terrains (2001), Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing (2002, co-curator), the first comprehensive museum exploration of surf culture's visual history; Whiteness, A Wayward Construction (2003), a groundbreaking examination of whiteness as cultural and visual identity; The OsCene: Contemporary Art and Culture in OC (2004), a landmark survey showcasing contemporary Orange County artists; and Pervasion: The Art of Gary Baseman and Tim Biskup (2006), an influential presentation of two prominent pop-surrealist artists. He also curated or co-curated several exhibitions from Laguna Art Museum’s permanent collection such as L.A. Art in the Early 90s  ReCharge  The Eileen and Peter Norton Gift (2000), Some Fuzzy Logic: The Joan Simon Menkes Gift (2003), Funny Business: Humor in Art from the Permanent Collection (2004), Conceptual Photography from the Collection (2005), California Art from the Permanent Collection, Part I, The Beginning, 1832-1925 and Part II, 1930s to 1950s (2005-2006, co-curator).

Prior to his tenure at Laguna Art Museum, he was director of programs at the then cutting-edge Huntington Beach Art Center (1995-1999), where he curated Kara Walker’s first Southern California solo exhibition, Kara Walker: African’t (1997), Are We Touched? Identities From Outer Space (1997), Robert Williams, New Work (1998), Simon Leung: Surf Vietnam (1998), and Rubén Ortiz Torres: Desmothernismo, A survey of work from 1990 to 1998 (1998), along with first-time surveys of long-standing Orange County-based artists, Richard Turner (1997) and Suvan Geer (1999).

Following his tenure at Laguna Art Museum, Stallings held several positions at University of California Riverside’s downtown museums (California Museum of Photography and Barbara & Art Culver Center of the Arts) including artistic director and interim executive director from 2007 to 2017. While there, he curated significant photography exhibitions, notably Truthiness: Photography as Sculpture (2008), examining photography’s shift into three-dimensional space; The Great Picture: The World's Largest Photograph (2011), a groundbreaking collaboration transforming an abandoned military hangar into a giant camera obscura; and Mexico at the Hour of Combat: Sabino Osuna’s Photographs of the Mexican Revolution (2012), recontextualizing early 20th-century war photography. He also initiated and co-curated Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas (2017), as part of the Getty PST LA/LA regional-wide project focusing on Latin America, as well as The Signs Pile Up: Paintings by Pedro Álvarez (2008), Your Donations Do Our Work: Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy (2009), Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art (2009, co-curator), Margarita Cabrera: Pulso y Martillo (Pulse and Hammer) (2011), Lewis deSoto and Erin Neff: Tahquitz (2012), and Free Enterprise—The Art of Citizen Space Exploration (2013), the first exhibition in the U.S. to look at artist working with space agencies around the world.

In his last institutional affiliation, he was director and senior curator at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College from 2018 to 2023. He curated Elizabeth Turk’s ThinkLab LIVE .002: Extinct Bird Cages (2018), Stargazers: Intersections of Contemporary Art & Astronomy (2019), Right Place, Right Time: A Survey of John Upton’s Photographs (2020), What Will Remain: Art in the Time of Human Dominion (2021), and Rebecca Campbell: Painting Feminine Power (2022).

An accomplished writer and editor, Stallings has contributed to and edited notable anthologies such as Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture (Bay Press, 1994) and Aridtopia: Essays on Art & Culture from Deserts in the Southwest United States (Blue West Books, 2013). His essays, art criticism, and hybrid works have appeared in Artforum, Artillery, Southwest Contemporary, Los Angeles Review, Los Angeles Times, OC Art Blog, and SoCal PBS’s Artbound. He is currently at work on a book of short stories titled Hotel Art, a collaborative project featuring images by artist Naida Osline. Together they explore the evocative intersections of narrative and visual art within hotel spaces.

Stallings earned an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1992. Currently working independently, he continues to explore the intersections of speculative themes, visual storytelling, and the human condition.