Inside / Outside October 6, 2007

Shotgun Space is pleased to announce Inside/Outside, featuring selections from Liz Kuball’s In Store series and Johanna Reed’s Fields series.

Born in Washington DC and now a resident of Santa Barbara, Liz Kuball’s photography explores consumerism and its ramifications through what we use and how we use it. Of In Store, Kuball explains:

Between 1985 and 2007, the square footage of self-storage facilities in the United States grew 740 percent, and driving the freeways of Southern California, this growth is evident. . . As I drove by storage facilities, I started thinking about what was behind those garage doors and padlocks. It occurred to me that the warehouses weren’t full of meaningless “stuff”—they were the repository for all kinds of memories that people weren’t willing to part with.

Liz Kuball has been documenting storage facilities throughout Southern California since, looking for “the beauty in these places, imagining what’s behind closed doors.” In presenting her photographs of the space in and around these storage facilities – the exteriors and interiors of the facilities, and their intrusion in the larger visual landscape – Kuball invites the viewer to imagine what’s behind closed doors along with her.

Johanna Reed is a fellow Santa Barbara resident whose photographs decontextualize common spaces and reframe them as studies of color and shape. For Fields, Reed looks beyond the utilitarian design of outdoor sport arenas to uncover the “aesthetic by-product at work on spaces built for non-aesthetic purposes.” Reed’s Fields may be the same fields played upon by competing teams, but through her camera, they become bright, playful arrangements of swooping lines, detailed textures, and bold colors.

Both Reed’s and Kuball’s works are informed by a social presence not directly portrayed in their photographs – we see no moving families in In Store, nor athletes in Fields, but the implications of these private and public gatherings loom over their photographs nonetheless. The almost painterly aesthetic of Reed’s photographs provide a counterpoint to the more studied, formal framings of Kuball’s.

Shotgun Space is excited to present both emerging photographers in their first Los Angeles show. A reception and opening gala will take place on Saturday, October 6th from 7-10pm. All are welcome.

Official Website: http://shotgunspace.com