John Houck

Artist lecture Wednesday, September 14, 2016 7PM
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth St., San Francisco, CA 94107

Los Angeles-based artist John Houck explores human perception and memory using both analog to digital technologies. By simultaneously resisting and embracing technology, Houck exploits the ambiguity between the artist’s hand and his digital tools, engaging viewers to grapple with what exactly they are looking at. His background in architecture informs his manipulation of space through the photographing and successive re-photographing of objects. Through Houck’s process of re-photographing, he “complicates the image” until he reaches a final composition and refers to the result as “a photograph of itself,” forcing a collapse of spatial and temporal relationships within a single image. 

In his most recent work, Houck rigorously arranges and photographs keepsakes given to him by his parents. Subsequent iterations of re-arrangement and re-photography create spatially layered images that evoke the complexity and malleable nature of memory, and show how objects laden with personal histories can drive the imagination and inspire new narratives. Houck refers to these images as “aggregate photographs,” emblems of the manner in which imagination and recollection alter and distort our views of our past lives.

Houck received his MFA from UCLA in 2007 and his BA in Architecture from Colorado University in 2000. He participated in the Whitney Independent Study (2010) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2008) programs. Houck’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He will have a solo exhibition at The Dallas Contemporary Museum in 2017.


Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program

Pier 24 Photography is pleased to present the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program in collaboration with California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Each year, the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program brings six photographers, writers, and curators to San Francisco to offer free and open lectures, and to work one-on-one with students at California College of the Arts.


Larry Sultan Photography Award


Jonathan Calm, Double Vision (Recording I), 2018

Jonathan Calm

Fall 2019 Residency
Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA

Click HERE for more information on the Larry Sultan Photography Award

Jonathan Calm is a visual artist who works in photography, video, installation, and performance. A central theme of his work is the relationship between photography and urban architecture, and the powerful role of images in the way architectural constructs shape the lives of individuals and communities.

In his most recent work, Calm explores the complex representation of African-American automobility from a historical and contemporary perspective, focusing and drawing on the importance and resonance of the Negro Motorist Green Book. Of this project, he explains, “the image of the infinite highway and the unbridled freedom to roam the land has always been considered a quintessential expression of the modern American spirit, but the black American experience of travel, which involves heightened subjectivity and exposure, has to this day proven a precarious privilege rather than an inalienable right.”

Calm’s art practice is international in scope and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2005); Role Play at the Tate Britain (2006); Black Is, Black Ain’t at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society (2008); Streetwise at the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid (2008) and the Chelsea Art Museum (2011); deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2013); and Rooted Movements at LMAKprojects in New York City (2014). Calm currently lives in Palo Alto, CA where he is a faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.