Louise Alexander Gallery/AFP is pleased to participate in Paris Photo 2021 (11-14 November 2021) with a presentation of photographs by John Divola, featuring some of his most important series: "Zuma" (1977-1978), "Dogs chasing my car in the desert" (1996-1998) and "As far as I could get" (1996-1997) Although the physical subjects that John Divola photographs range from buildings to landscapes to objects in the studio, his concerns are conceptual: they challenge the boundaries between fiction and reality, as well as the limitations of art to describe life. John Divola is from Southern California, and his imagery often reflects that locale by including urban Los Angeles or the nearby ocean, mountains, and desert. Divola grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which he credits as having an impact on his development as an artist. He earned a BA from California State University, Northridge in 1971 and an MA from University of California, Los Angeles in 1973. In college, the new art movements that inspired him--Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Earthworks--were often not easily accessible, but encountered through photographic documentation. "I came to the conclusion that [photography] was the primary arena of contemporary art," Divola has said, "and that all painting and sculpture and performance was, from a practical point of view, made to be photographed, to be re-contextualized, and talked or written about." After earning an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1974, Divola developed his own combination of performance art, sculpture, and installation, with photography at its conceptual core. One of Divola's earliest projects, Zuma, brought him critical acclaim. Zuma is a photographic record made over time of a beachfront property that was being used intermittently by the fire department for fire-fighting practice. As Divola observed the building over the course of two years, it was ravaged by fire, vandalism, and the artist's own graffiti. These acts of human "intervention," as he saw them, became integrated with the inevitable natural processes of decay. © John Divola 2021 #parisphoto #johndivola #louisealexandergallery #afprojects