Traces of Us: Recent Photography

Farah Al Qasimi, Widline Cadet, John Edmonds, Pao Houa Her, Guadalupe Rosales

Opening reception: Saturday, February 1, 6 – 8pm

February 1 – March 22, 2025

Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present Traces of Us: Recent Photography, a group exhibition of new and recent works by Farah Al Qasimi, Widline Cadet, John Edmonds, Pao Houa Her, and Guadalupe Rosales. There is an opening reception on February 1, 6 – 8pm at 176 Grand Street, New York with the exhibition on view through March 22.

Traces of Us assembles five contemporary artists who employ photography to observe, document, and complicate personal histories and wider collective experiences. Though varied in their approaches, Al Qasimi, Cadet, Edmonds, Her, and Rosales each preserve and create cultural memory by challenging prevailing concepts and structures. Their works underscore the particular environments and inherited pasts that have informed them, while simultaneously bringing these aspects into the present.

Evocative objects, uninhabited spaces, and constructed portraits allude to concepts of self and community, while questioning how fixed memories can be. Obscured or absent figures echo throughout many of the photographs as remnants of histories, while some portraits suggest a reclaiming and/or forming of a past and sense of self. Reframing perceptions of culture as fluid, unfolding, and informed by a particular perspective, each artists’ work stretches across geographies and pasts that are real, imagined, and monolithic.

Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living

Oct 1 – Dec 31, 2023

Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living is the sixth iteration of the Hammer’s biennial exhibition highlighting the practices of artists working throughout the greater Los Angeles area. These practices embrace the value of craft, materiality, performance, and collectivity. The biennial situates art as an expanded field of culture that is entangled with everyday life; community networks; queer affect; and indigenous and diasporic histories.

Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living takes its title from a quote by the renowned Los Angeles artist Noah Purifoy, which is inscribed on a plaque at the Watts Towers: “One does not have to be a visual artist to utilize creative potential. Creativity can be an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.” The history of Watts Towers—built by Simon Rodia over the course of 33 years and then preserved by the local South L.A. community, including Purifoy, to become a hub for arts education—embodies this ethos and offers a salient metaphor for this biennial.