JOHN DIVOLA : THE LANDSCAPE AND THE THINGS IN THE WAY
October 29 – December 11, 2026
Opening Reception with Artist Talk: October 29, 4:30 – 7:30 pm
Artist Talk in Room 6304: 6:00 – 7:00 pm
From 2015 to 2025, John Divola visited George Air Force Base in Victorville, California, to observe and photograph its abandoned housing. A. Quincy Jones, in service of the U.S. government, designed and built the roughly 600 housing units at GAFB between 1965 and 1972. When the base closed in 1992, groundwater contamination emptied the neighborhoods, leaving the modernist structures to deteriorate in the desert.
Divola’s observations capture a site full of “gesture”: ripped-open drywall that once held copper wire, paintball impacts from the war games of military trainees, and trees torn from the ground by a bulldozer recklessly passing between buildings.
He also adds his own marks to the site, a practice he has pursued in abandoned buildings for fifty years. In the 1970s, he entered vacant houses around Los Angeles, sprayed dots, grids, and spirals across walls and ceilings, and photographed his interventions, acting as both witness and participant. At George, he returned to this method across hundreds of identical rooms. Circles, ovals, and blobs of black, silver, and color appear against peeling paint and exposed plaster, balancing the specific and the abstract.
Divola also adds his own marks to the site, a practice he has pursued in abandoned buildings for fifty years. In the 1970s, he entered vacant houses around Los Angeles, sprayed dots, grids, and spirals across walls and ceilings, and photographed his interventions, acting as both witness and participant. At George, he returned to this method across hundreds of identical rooms. Circles, ovals, and blobs of black, silver, and color appear against peeling paint and exposed plaster, balancing the specific and the abstract.
In Enso: 36 Right-Handed Circumference Gestures, created over 36 days in the summer of 2018, Divola selects a unique room and attempts to draw a circle in spray paint, tracing the circumference of his right arm. Each image, displayed in sequence, indexes place, time, and his physical presence. The repeated gesture becomes the throughline, yet each circle is unique.
Divola considers his photographs artifacts of a physical, intellectual, technological, and experiential engagement. George concentrates several engagements at once: the massive, deadly momentum of the Cold War; the fictive battlefield of war games after the base closed; and his own engagement with medium, sensibility, and both cultural and personal histories. The results range from sinister to formal, social, humorous, and personal.
John Divola (b. 1949, Los Angeles) is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He has had more than one hundred solo exhibitions. His work has appeared in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial (1981 and 2017), LACMA, SFMOMA, and the Center Pompidou. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and four NEA Individual Artist Fellowships.