Archive Project 12: Charles LaBelle

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The Project Series
Project 12: Charles LaBelle

Charles LaBelle’s work—the video installation Horror of Light, and two photographs from the Illuminated Mounds series—reflects his long-standing interest in subjectivity, memory, and movement. For almost ten years, LaBelle has created photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations that address the interrelationships among cartography, documentary narratives, the built environment, and the individual. He investigates “in-between” moments, states, and territories—the often-overlooked spaces, objects, and people of contemporary society. By transforming ordinary experiences and images into the oddly extraordinary, LaBelle creates objects that alter our perceptions of the mundane and the profound in everyday life.

In past work, LaBelle’s interest in interstitial moments and transitional spaces manifested itself in explorations of ideas and images associated with such things as hotels, motels, night life, discarded furniture, used clothes, and passing clouds. The photographs and objects that resulted from these earlier explorations often addressed the relationship of the body to its surroundings and the experiences and memories of the body.

LaBelle’s process also relates to his relationship with the body and space. He frequently sets up systematic, almost obsessive, parameters within which to work. Over the years, he has undertaken a variety of tasks: He documented every building he entered every day for a predetermined amount of time; he recorded all the neon signs in his neighborhood—one color at a time; and he rescued, then decorated, mattresses and sofas found around Los Angeles and returned them to their original sites.

While LaBelle created Horror of Light and the photographs concurrently, Horror of Light is part of a large, yearlong project that he worked on called 2001: A Space Odyssey. This project involved shooting video footage of the road every time and everywhere he drives during the course of the year; a second tiny camera mounted on the steering wheel continually videotaped him as he drives. Specific moments in that footage began to interest him, and he started to think of ways to distill them into their own discrete works. Horror of Light was the second of these.

The search for illumination—in all its readings—has long been of interest to LaBelle, and is particularly apparent in the work presented here. Deriving from a recent road trip across the United States, Horror of Light consists of footage shot during repeated journeys through the mile-long Eisenhower Tunnel in Colorado. It may represent the self-searching implicit in the notion of the “road trip,” the illusive search for the light at the end of the tunnel, the transformation implied in a journey through the “underworld,” and a simple drive to locate oneself in time and space.

In this recent work, LaBelle’s process has shifted to become more poetic and performative. Here the relationship to the body is subtle—the bodily presence is implied in his trips through the tunnel, and only hinted at in the Illuminated Mounds. To create the photographs, LaBelle worked at night on empty construction sites. Using very long exposures, he illuminated the mounds by moving his lights over the piles of dirt—essentially painting the mounds with light.

The exhibition of work by Charles LaBelle was the twelfth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator