The Glendale College Art Gallery welcomes Alex Slade, adjunct professor of photography at Otis College of Art and Design, as curator of the upcoming exhibition 'Psychogeographies', which runs from December 2nd, 2006 - January 20, 2007. Slade is a Los Angeles-based artist, known in part for his concise photographic depiction of the urban context and urban consciousness. Key to Slade's art practice is a meditation on the experience of 'place', and quite often he constructs a solitary viewer inscribed within a reasonably stark landscape or room. What arises from his practice is suggestion: often of a whisper, whispers, or a soft voice; sometimes the idea of time as oceanic.

In his note to the gallery on the show, Slade offers the following quote, from Guy Debord, noted instigator of the Situationist International movement, from 1955: “Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals.  The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.” 

Los Angeles is home to a community, indeed a tradition, of idea-based photographers, for whom the photograph results from highly specific action - action which sets the photograph up as a repository for psychological investment. Our city enjoys a relationship with international art culture through the medium. Slade has chosen from Los Angeles six emerging practitioners within this field of aesthetic inquiry: Patterson Beckwith, Shannon Ebner, Marie Jager, Arthur Ou, Tracy Powell, and Greg Wilken.