Night Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Josh Callaghan’s Social Block, an installation that inaugurates the gallery’s new outdoor exhibition space. There will be an opening reception Saturday, February 1, 2020, from 3 to 5pm.
Social Block takes its inspiration from the humble cinder block, among the most ubiquitous elements of the modern human built environment. At approximately 2.3 times normal scale, Social Block forms a new relationship to the human body, existing at the juncture of sculpture, furniture, and architecture.
In designing Social Block, Callaghan drew from William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, a seminal work of urban research into the interactions of crowds with public parks and plazas. Whyte’s concept of triangulation, the “process by which some external stimulus provides a linkage between people and prompts strangers to talk to each other as though they were not" is a guiding principle of this project. Social Block has utility.
Social Block emerges from an intersection of aesthetic influences – in the artist’s words, “John Carpenter theme park meets Isamu Noguchi garden.” The installation is a tableau, an associative landscape onto which the viewer is invited to project the long arc of human history and its cycles of construction, destruction, and renewal.
Josh Callaghan (b. 1969, Doylestown, Pennsylvania) lives and works Los Angeles. In addition to a solo exhibition at Night Gallery in October 2017, he has had solo exhibitions at Harmony Murphy Gallery, Los Angeles; Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles; Haas & Fischer Gallery, Zurich; and Bank Gallery, Los Angeles; as well as public projects in cities across the US as well as abroad. In 2020, he will participate in a two person exhibition at Carpentaria by Fortes d'Aloia & Gabriel, Rio, Brazil. Group exhibitions include Weather Report, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Current LA: Water, Public Art Biennale, Los Angeles; Vapegoat Rising, Arturo Bandini at Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX; Made in Space, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; and Frieze Sculpture Park, Frieze New York. Social Block is his second solo exhibition at Night Gallery.
