John Divola

Over the course of a career spanning five decades, California-based artist John Divola has redefined the possibilities of the photographic medium, blending its observational precision with expressive experimentation. Challenging traditional notions of photography’s role as merely a transparent document of reality, Divola’s work explores the intersections of photography with painting, performance, installation, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. The Ghost in the Machine, on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery from January 9 through February 22, 2025, brings together works from Divola’s latest series, Blue with Exceptions (2019–2024), alongside selections from his seminal early series, Vandalism (1973–1975). This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to trace the evolution of Divola’s practice and his enduring fascination with the process of image-making. A reception with the artist will be held on January 9, 6–8pm.

Since 2015, Divola has created numerous photographic projects at the abandoned George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. The Base was closed in the early ‘90s and now stands as a relic of Cold War-era militarization and environmental neglect. In Blue with Exceptions (2019–2024), his most recent project at the site, Divola captures its physical deterioration and layers of marks left by time, nature, human activity, and his own earlier interventions, creating a dialogue between the spectral presence of history within the abandoned spaces and the gestural possibilities of photography, between what remains and what is lost. As the artist notes: “Photographs can accommodate a broad range of interpretations, from the concretely informational, social, political, and esthetic to an index of a specific life and its engagements. I aspire to embrace that messy complexity.”

On view in the project gallery are a number of works from Divola’s seminal Vandalism (1973–1975) series, the first instance in which he intervened in a space in order to photograph it. Illegally entering and photographing abandoned homes in greater Los Angeles, Divola spray-painted the interiors with patterns such as grids, spirals, and dots, engaging in a form of physical and conceptual mark-making that pushed his process beyond purely documenting what he saw. Using black, white, and silver paint to align with the tonal range of the black-and-white silver gelatin prints, his interventions played with perspective, light, and depth, at times disorienting the viewer and questioning photography’s conventional role as a transparent window to the world. By photographing his acts of “vandalism,” Divola affirmed his approach to the photograph as both documentation and artifact, where the artist’s physical engagement with a space becomes inscribed within the image. Years later, Divola revisited similar themes in his Abandoned Paintings (2006–2008) series, recontextualizing discarded amateur artworks, deteriorated by time, by photographing them within derelict interiors.

In Blue with Exceptions, Divola takes this gesture further by introducing AI-generated imagery into his work; idealized images of songbirds are inserted into the dilapidated interiors of the Base and then re-photographed. His interest in the interplay between the symbolic and the specific is highlighted here, as he juxtaposes the specificity of the decaying site—laden with social and historical significance—and the amorphous, non-space of AI-generated visions. There is a palpable sense of fragility within these tightly-framed images, as if the birds might be trying to break free from the crumbling walls that confine them. These uncanny pictures within pictures open up questions about the role of technology in shaping our perception of reality. Indeed, the artist sees the songbirds as symbols of environmental sensitivity—a metaphorical “canary in the coal mine”—which he links to the “dawning of the Anthropocene” and humanity’s fraught relationship with the natural world.