RIVERSIDE, CALIF.- UCR ARTS is presenting the first U.S. career survey of work by Brandon Lattu. Empirical, Textual, Contextual, curated by Charlotte Cotton, on view through February 6, 2022, at UCR ARTS’ California Museum of Photography in downtown Riverside, California.

Situated within the broad and mercurial image environment in which we create and consume, this sensorial and cerebral exhibition examines Lattu’s twenty-five-year artistic practice working in photography, sculpture, and video. Including both his pioneering work as an early adopter of digital imaging processes alongside recent and new projects that employ technologies like computer-aided design and light sensors, the exhibition offers insights into the through lines of his substantial creative life.

Speaking to the concept and title of his exhibition, Brandon Lattu says, “this exhibition shifts back and forth between the empirical experience of fascination and the ways that the unruliness of art is frequently governed by texts, visible or otherwise.”

“Brandon’s cultural influence rests in his ongoing capacity to push ideas about photography and the patterns and paradoxes of our cultural conditions, regardless of material form. This exhibition offers a distilled and dynamic experience of a remarkable creative journey over the past three decades, one that has culminated into an exhibition of deep contemporary resonance,” says the exhibition’s curator Charlotte Cotton.

The works on view include singular photographic prints, videos, and animated slideshows, computer-carved sculptures, and an interactive light installation. Miracle Mile (2000) is a sequence of images depicting illuminated signs perpendicular to the flow of traffic on Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and La Brea avenues in Los Angeles. An early and inquisitive use of digital imaging and composition, each section stacks the internally lit signs with adherence to their actual position and relative scale.

The Not Human (2013) slideshow centers on the computational failure of early biometric algorithms to distinguish between an inanimate representation of a face and an actual human being. Using Lattu’s photographic archive of 120,000 images digitally captured between 2003 and 2013, algorithmic filters consistently fail to recognize human subjects and, instead, select and crop pictures of faces used in advertising that are placed in public by the commercial desires of industry. The consistent digital errors are both galling and entertaining, especially in light of the inherent biases as well as failures of our present-day biometric environment.




Reciprocity of Light (2007-10/202) is an artwork exploring photographic representation, architecture, and bodily interactivity. First developed by Lattu in 2007, the installation is activated by the movement of bodies through the space, turning a viewer’s shadow cast from a point light source onto an array of light-sensitive cells such that the shadow is produced in a display of light, a reversal of our normal phenomenological expectation of a shadow as a denial of light. The simultaneous action of the individual cells demonstrates the indexical nature of photography by abstracting the form and motion of the body in real-time.

Other works investigate the empirical capacities of photography, such as Denim, Levi’s 501©, Made in USA (2002), where Lattu scanned the denim of a pair of Levi’s 501© and printed at actual size to make the most accurate rendition of this iconic American material. Since this work was made, the production of Levi’s 501© jeans has moved outside of the USA. Together, the approximately forty objects on view attest to Lattu’s restlessly experimental approach to the conceptual freedom of photography.

Brandon Lattu

Lattu investigates the constantly changing state of representation in order to push beyond the conventional empiricism that pictures of the world have traditionally invoked. His work particularly addresses the social structures emphasized and enforced by models of perspective and abstraction as well as spatial hierarchies in architecture and commerce.

Solo exhibitions include Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2019); Koenig and Clinton, New York (2013); Mak Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2010); and Kunstverein, Bielefeld, Germany (2007). His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar (2021); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (2013); Powerstation of Art, Shanghai, China (2012); Fundación Jumex, Ecatapec, Mexico (2012); Museum Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany (2011); the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, NL (2009); Vox Centre de L’image Contemporaine, Montreal, Canada (2008); the Essl Collection, Vienna, Austria (2007); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2006); and the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2000).

Lattu lives and works in Los Angeles and is a Professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Riverside.