Gino Sullivan has lived in Los Angeles for over three decades. His love for L.A is all about the light and the way it makes him feel. Sullivan’s photographs of Los Angeles hover somewhere between memory and tomorrow.
Sullivan’s favorite subject is the literal, and oftentimes the metaphorical, billboard which is often present in his work. In fact, everything in his world is super-scaled like the billboard itself.
Sullivan builds his photographs from multiple images only occasionally letting on to this process when a corner is left raw. He likes to surprise and unsettle with incongruous added genres and colour from advertising, films, street signs and the Bible. [Jeremiah 29.11: “For I know the plans I have for you; plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”]
While Sullivan's images do not romanticize the golden city, neither are they apocalyptic — there’s something of Joan Didion in their whole-hearted celebration of all things Californian combined with an unreal stillness. “Things work better here,” Didion said of California, “because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
Sullivan’s landscape seems to go on forever. A landscape of hope and future. “What I love about photography,” says Sullivan, “is where it takes you. I don’t really know where I’m going to go, but I don’t have to understand. That’s the mystery.”
Exhibitions:
Billboards at Media Rare Gallery, Los Angeles, December 2000
Graffiti at Lapides Gallery, Santa Fe, September 2001
Views, Gallerie du Lac, Switzerland, October 2004
Universal Studios, Ave Montaigne, Paris 2005
Publications:
Paris Vogue, August 2000, 2002 Views of Los Angeles, 2004