Los Angeles: Meditations on the Edge
Fred Kaplan January 23–25, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, January 23, 5:00–7:00 PM
Location: LA Artcore
120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012
Los Angeles, CA — LA Artcore is pleased to present Los Angeles: Meditations on the Edge, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist Fred Kaplan, on view January 23–25, 2026, with an opening reception on January 23 from 5–7 PM.
Rooted in a lifelong relationship with the city, Kaplan’s work traces its origins to the edge of the Los Angeles River, where chain-link fences once restricted human interaction with water and land alike. From these margins, Kaplan began photographing the city’s overlooked thresholds— sites where radically engineered urban infrastructures meet the persistent, organic forms of nature.
Working at the intersection of abstraction and observation, Kaplan invites viewers to reconsider their relationship to the environments we collectively inhabit. His photographs bear witness to elements in constant flux—sky, light, concrete, water—revealing a subtle beauty embedded within spaces often dismissed as utilitarian. As urban infrastructure proliferates and the city erases traces of its past, nature pushes insistently through cracks in the concrete, quietly asserting its presence and endurance.
Nowhere is this convergence more visible than in the Los Angeles River. Commonly perceived as a concrete channel glimpsed from freeways, the river reminds us that Los Angeles is built atop a vast and volatile water basin. A source of both life and devastation, its history reflects the intertwined social, economic, and political forces that have shaped the city itself.
Kaplan is drawn to liminal spaces and repeating patterns—sites where forces merge, dismantle, and re-emerge transformed: beautiful yet violent, banal yet sublime. His visual language is informed by the compositional rigor and color sensibilities of Piet Mondrian, Richard Diebenkorn, and Mark Rothko, as well as by systems thinking articulated in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software by Steven Johnson. In this framework, Los Angeles is understood not as a fixed entity but as a living system—self-organizing, adaptive, and perpetually unfinished.
About LA Artcore:
LA Artcore is a non-profit art space dedicated to the creative exploration, discovery, and expression of Los Angeles and global residents while supporting the careers of established and emerging contemporary artists. Since 1979, LA Artcore has presented more than 1,600 exhibitions across its two gallery spaces, fostering visual and performing arts as vital conduits for the communities in which artists live, work, and serve.
Committed to equity, inclusion, and accessibility, LA Artcore values the voices of artists, curators, staff, volunteers, visitors, and its surrounding ecology. The organization embraces diversity across race, gender, sexuality, socio-economic background, and ability, and continually advances its mission through collaboration, radical learning, and community engagement.
LA Artcore acknowledges that it operates on the native land of the Tongva people and honors their enduring relationship to this land, while recognizing the histories of colonization, forced removal, and erasure. Located within Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo Historic District, the gallery also acknowledges the precarious history of the Little Tokyo community and remains committed to mutual support, preservation, and amplification of local and Indigenous voices.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible, offers designated parking spaces, welcomes service animals, and strives to meet WCAG accessibility guidelines. Feedback is welcomed and encouraged.
For additional information, please contact info@laartcore.org or call (213) 617-3274.
