RIVERSIDE, CA.- The Sweeney Art Gallery presents The Lateral Slip, a group exhibition guest curated by Jan Tumlir. Artists: Bas Jan Ader, Skip Arnold, David H. Bailey, Mark Bennett, Jessica Bronson, John Divola, Robbert Flick, Mark Flores, Kevin Hanley, Jesse Herring, Michael Markowsky, Gil Omry, Jorge Pardo, Ed Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Jaro Straub, Mungo Thomson, Lincoln Tobier, Kerry Tribe, Ultra-Red, Benjamin Weissman & Pae White. The Lateral Slip gathers together three generations of artists – beginning with the generation of the sixties/seventies all the way up to the present day – each of whom have attempted to describe the “Los Angeles experience” by way of a representational engagement with the landscape of the city and its environs. Together, their works bear a relation to the “New Topographics” movement in fine art photography; above all, to the idea that a “straightforward” recording of the built surface of the urban/suburban milieu can tell us something about “how it works.” At the same time, none confine their purview to the empirical “facts.” Ostensible objectivity is undermined at every turn by an acute subjectivism so that an “art of description” becomes merged with an “art of storytelling.” The lure of the fantastic, the symbolic, the fictional and unreal is inherent in the object in this case: this city that exists at the very hub of what now is a diffuse, globalized “Society of Spectacle.” It is as though every inch of this landscape has been revealed already, exposed to a mediated glare and imprinted upon the perception, consciousness and memory of the collective. Accordingly, whatever it is that is materially available “there” for the artist to describe is also, from the first moment, pervaded with the vague, hallucinatory tracings of a spectacular “elsewhere” – a make-believe world that shares a border with this one.