Los Angeles: Meditations on the Edge: Photographs by Fred Kaplan
JANUARY 23rd-25th, 2026
Gallery Hours: Friday–Sunday, 12-4 pm
Growing up in Los Angeles, Fred Kaplan took his first photograph at the edge of the Los Angeles River, where chain-link fences once prevented human interaction with the water. Kaplan captured the juxtapositions of radically engineered urban environments with the organic shapes of nature.
Working at the intersection of abstraction and observation, Kaplan asks us to reconsider our relationship to the environments we collectively inhabit and recognize their subtle beauty, while bearing witness to elements in a state of constant flux: sky, light, concrete, water. As urban infrastructures proliferate and the city erases its past, nature pushes through cracks in the concrete in its insistence to life, quietly asserting its dominance.
Nothing bears witness to this convergence of forces more than the Los Angeles River. Often overlooked as a concrete channel by urban commuters, the river reminds us that the city is built on a vast water basin. A source of life and devastation, its history is a testament not only to the power of nature but to the complex social, economic, and political dynamics that have shaped the city.
Kaplan is drawn to patterns and liminal spaces that merge and dismantle each other in this relentless evolution, only to re-emerge transformed: beautiful yet violent, banal yet sublime. He draws inspiration from Mondrian, Diebenkorn and Rothko, among others. His vision of Los Angeles as an organically growing entity is also informed by Steven Johnson’s book “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software,” which explores how complex systems, from ant colonies to cities, organize themselves without centralized control.
