VALLEY OF THE SUN
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar, 72" x 32" x 4"
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar, walnut, and mirror, 48" x 32" x 5"
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar, walnut, and mirror, 48 x 32 x 5 in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival pigment print on silk, poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Archival Pigment Print on Silk, Poplar 9 x 12 x 2in
Valley of the Sun, uses photography, collage, and sculpture to explore the relationship of photography to constructed notions of time, truth, nature, identity, and history, with a particular focus on the history of American landscape photography. Valley of the Sun utilizes a near complete archive of Arizona Highways magazine to explore the relationship between image-making, the landscape, and American cultural identity.
If grandiose early American landscape paintings were the original advertisements for America that encouraged many to conquer their way west, then Arizona Highways is its post-war equivalent, re-branding the same individualistic nationalism for the atomic age of family road trips. Arizona Highways, a bureaucratic report on road infrastructure turned pseudo-historical travel guide has evolved into a culture-travel magazine. Historically it featured high quality landscape photography, including the work of artists like Ansel Adams, embedded within a reification of Americanness.
The American West becomes a wonderland of beautiful, but digestible landscapes envisioned as an easily accessible theme park of sights to see. Arizona is a stand in for a mythical notion of the West, embodying an identity that includes remnants of settler mentality: the land is there for your pleasure, a natural resource that you can use to enhance your wealth or contemporary self-image. This can be seen in anthropological scrolls of social media networks through replicas of famous views that were first published in Arizona Highways. This imagery perpetuates desire, an unattainable state of being, the aestheticization of nature, and the American Dream. In working with this archive Doty Glasco asks the question: how is myth made?
On a year-long research trek across the country, Doty Glasco re-photographed many of the same iconic views, scavenged for artifacts, and built their extensive Arizona Highways archive. The physical exertion of this journey is mirrored in Doty Glasco’s studio practice within their conceptual and physical approach to photography. Specific pages from the archive are scanned like negatives, resulting in a double exposure that overlaps iconic landscapes. This doubling reverberates the psychological echoes of what these icons represent, allowing the viewer to contemplate the complexity of how these images function within the context of Arizona Highways as a myth building vehicle.
In Valley of the Sun, photographs become three dimensional, stretched and floating in space or hanging free, flag-like with light filtering through landscapes, referencing painting and Americana. A freestanding doorway and two window sculptures comment on the constructed American dream, turning the booth into a house-like structure. Antiqued mirrors within these sculptures disorient the viewer and reference the mechanism of a camera. These layered landscapes, metaphorically conveying heaviness, stability, and geologic time, are transgressively printed onto silk, giving them a ghostly and fragile quality. Doty Glasco uses silk’s formal properties as a destabilizing lens to consider the image’s original context, allowing the viewer to contemplate the process of image-making and the constructs of photography.
While combing through their archive, Doty Glasco categorized the tourist viewpoints, grouping all visually similar depictions. These typologies can be viewed as re-performances of photographs taken by different photographers over half a century – any variations of composition, color, or form reveal characteristics of individuality, thus are clues to deconstructing myth. Doty Glasco’s typology grid allows the viewer to unpack aesthetic strategies employed by Arizona Highways and the history of landscape photography.
Doty Glasco’s work disrupts the mythic quality of the archived images and reclaims landscape photography as a powerful aesthetic tool for critical investigations of larger power structures.
A SIGN IN SPACE
A SIGN IN SPACE is inspired by the short stories of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. These 12 short stories are based on the the evolution of the universe with characters that are fashioned from mathematical and cellular structures. For Doty Glasco, Calvino’s exploration of pre-time and space serve as a direct illustration of the tenets of postmodern theory; that the sign is not the thing it signifies, nor can one claim to fully or properly describe a thing or an idea with a word or other symbol.
Calvino writes, “I knew that signs also allow others to judge the one who makes them, and that in the course of a galactic year tastes and ideas have time to change, and the way of regarding the earlier ones depends on what comes afterwards; in short, I was afraid a sign that now might seem perfect to me, in two hundred or six hundred million years would make me look absurd.” Doty Glasco uses Calvino’s framework to explore history and time in collage works mounted on silver gelatin prints made from abstract glass plate negatives.
TIME ALWAYS FINDS YOU
Time Always Finds You, explores metaphorical abstractions of time generated through landscape photography while physically engaging the viewer’s perception. Doty Glasco deconstructs the framework of photography and meticulously re-assembles the parts into photographic sculptural expressions of the sublime. Employing metaphorical strategy, Time Always Finds You captures a single moment in time when ever changing water ossifies and visual alchemy transforms it into stone. These seascapes-cum-landscapes, conveying heaviness, stability, and geologic time, are transgressively printed onto the thinnest silk available, giving them a ghostly and fragile quality.
Doty Glasco uses silk’s formal properties as a destabilizing lens that reflects the image’s original context, allowing the viewer to contemplate the process of image-making and the constructs of photography. Some works jut perpendicular from the wall, stereoscopically stretched across both sides of a frame. The doubled image creates a flicker of holographic optical illusion, heightened by the moire effect in the weave of the fabric. In other works, Doty Glasco loosely stretch the silk, allowing the image to ripple with the viewer’s movements in tandem with the natural environment’s air currents - another reminder of displacement. Additional works in the series use the water imagery as an actual framing mechanism, much like faux-marbling, to view massive rock formations that appear to be natural sculptures. Symbolically, the use of marble is multivalent. Marble makes monuments from mountains and busts and buildings that become ruins associated with history - it can be both a natural object and a human artifact. Marble, much like photography, becomes a record of time, a proof of human existence, and our own mortality.
THE WHITE PLACE
FOUNTAIN OF FOUR RIVERS
The Fountain of Four Rivers, utilizes images from Doty Glasco's archive combined with rephotographed images from vintage books as a means to explore ideas of the American Landscape through historical and cultural forms.
Through a meticulous and delicate manipulation of pictorial strategies, Doty Glasco reshape traditional narratives into physical and psychological spaces of transcendental abstraction and inherent impermanence.
The Fountain of Four Rivers, continue the duo's investigation into portals for contemplating the invisible within the visible. Repositories of action and artifact, the Fountain of Four Rivers series illuminates the boundlessness of multiplicity as windows in space, suspended in time.
FUTURELANDS
Doty Glasco uses photography, collage, and sculpture to explore the relationship of image to constructed notions of time, truth, nature, identity, and history. Two of Doty Glasco’s recent projects, Futurelands explores metaphorical abstractions of time generated through landscape photography while physically engaging the viewer’s perception. Doty Glasco deconstructs the framework of photography and meticulously re-assembles the parts into photographic sculptural expressions of the sublime.
The Futurelands series features close-cropped images of slot canyons that invert traditional landscape photography by creating portal-like meditations bordering on the psychedelic. Biomorphic undulating rocky forms in acid-trip colors are printed then physically manipulated. Each image is meticulously hand-abraded, using sandpaper to enhance highlights and adding graphite to shadows, Doty Glasco physically alters each photograph just enough to create a glitch in the viewer’s perception.
Certain works stand upright, supported by sticks and rocks collected at the photographic site, suggesting the precariousness of photographic construct and referencing the fragility of the environment. Both images and artifacts act as documentation of Doty Glasco’s displaced year, contrasted by the artists’ metaphoric depiction of rock formations as a symbol of geologic time. The photographic sculptures of Futurelands, reference a micro-macro infinity loop of time, perpetuated by photography’s unavoidable and intrinsic relationship to time. Doty Glasco deconstructs the magnitude of image-making and its fundamental relationship to the fallibility of the human construct of time.
PAST LIVES
INNER GROTTO
THE ORIGINALS
GRACELAND
As I walked down the driveway I could feel the simultaneous ethereal and surreal excitement, Elvis fans pushed by me, walking in a hurry to be the first inside our 30 minute tour in the home of The King. The embodiment of the archetypal success story, Graceland, is the symbol of the Golden Age of America, a time when everything truly was possible. A unique time capsule, Graceland at its core is a medium for memory and its magnetism undeniable. This is where the evidence of a fictional reality remains vacuum-sealed for our enjoyment. Graceland has become a symbolic representation, a timeless place for the imperishable American Dream, it is the place where it all began and where some of it…ended. Elvis is dead, but we are not. We are the lonely and we gather at Graceland to mourn our youth so that in public we can mask the defeat.
WALKING ON THE MOON
CALIFORNIA
CONTACT
ABOUT
DOTY GLASCO was the collaborative practice of artists JR Doty and Joe Glasco from 2010–2024. Together, they created bodies of work that explored the passage of time as a means to revisit nature in a contemporary framework. Working with photography, collage and sculpture, Doty Glasco's work mined the intersection of their personal histories with the politics of landscape, exploring the aesthetic relationship between locations, composition, textures and contexts. The artists met in 2010 in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute. Their work was shown both locally and internationally at galleries in London, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York and San Francisco.
Doty Glasco's work utilized an archive of images, objects and artifacts found while traveling across America. The images were taken in specific geographic locations because of their unique geological conditions. They represented the essence of nature with an emphasis on the phenomena of time and its effects on the landscape’s topography. Photography played an active role as the visual archive, while the materials used mirrored the landscape’s natural movement through cycles of erosion and transformation.
Each body of work utilized landscape typology to focus on abstractions of time, using specific materials to create newly formed topography. By establishing a relationship between perception and materiality, the artists created material constructions of their perceptual responses to the land.
CV
b. 1981, New Orleans, LA / b. 1988, Chattanooga, TN
Collaborative practice, 2010–2024
EDUCATION JR DOTY
2011 MFA Photography, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
2003 BA Sociology, Wheaton College, Norton, MA
2001 BFA Photography, University of Westminster, London, UK
EDUCATION JOE GLASCO
2012 MFA Photography, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
2008 BFA Photography, School of the Art Institute Chicago, IL
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2020 TIME WARP Gospel Flat Gallery, Bolinas, CA
2018 TIMELESS ENDLESS TIME FORT LA, Los Angeles, CA
2017 VALLEY OF THE SUN Neon Heater Gallery, Ohio
2016 VALLEY OF THE SUN VOLTA NY, New York, NY
2015 TIME ALWAYS FINDS YOU CES Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2014 ROAD VOYAGE Smoking Nun Gallery, San Francisco, CA
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2020 BRIGHT GOLDEN HAZE Oklahoma Contemporary Museum, Oklahoma City, OK
2020 B-SIDES BLNS HDWR, Bolinas, CA
2019 VINTAGE VISTAS NewKartel, San Francisco, CA
2017 TRANSFIX Good Children Gallery, New Orleans, LA
2017 VALLEY OF THE SUN Neon Heater Gallery, Ohio
2016 FRESH START Arena 1 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2016 LA N CV3 Coachella Valley Art Center, Indio CA
2016 CALIFORNIA COOL Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
2016 DEEP SUPERFICIAL PERCEPTIONS CES Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2015 THE WHITE PLACE Start Art Fair, London, UK
2015 PALETTE TO PALATE Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
2015 DOUBLE VISIONS The Active Space, Bushwick, NY
2015 PERFECT STRANGERS Eighteenth Street Arts, Los Angeles, CA
2015 SEMIOSPHERES Ace Hotel, Los Angeles, CA
2014 LANDS END Miami Project, CES Gallery, Miami, FL
2014 EVERYONES TIME IS THEIR OWN Alterspace, San Francisco, CA
2013 SCENES FROM THE SOUTH Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, NY
2013 TAKE ME AWAY San Francisco Arts Commission, City Hall, San Francisco, CA
2013 THE DETROITS Aldea, San Francisco, CA
2013 MAGIC MOUNTAINS Serpentine, San Francisco, CA
2013 SOUTHERN TALES No. 308, Nashville, TN
2012 POINT OF NO RETURN Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA
2012 DAYS TO COME 5 Claude Lane, San Francisco, CA
2012 VERNISSAGE Phoenix Hotel, San Francisco, CA
2012 HOME 5 Claude Lane, San Francisco, CA
2011 MANIFEST 770 Incline Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2011 RUSH ARTISAN SERIES 5 Claude Lane, San Francisco, CA
2011 VERNISSAGE SF Winery, San Francisco, CA
2011 AMERICAN WEST? Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2011 DESERTED Still Lights Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2010 HOME IS STILL HERE Still Lights Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2010 BOLLYWED Vessel, San Francisco, CA
2009 NIGHTLAND Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2009 MOVING TOWARDS LIGHT Vessel, San Francisco, CA
2009 HANGING ONTO POWERLINES Still Lights Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2008 TERRA INFIRMA Gallery 2, Chicago, IL
2006 CANDY & CIGARETTES Unit D Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
2003 LONE GUNMEN Beard Gallery, Boston, MA
2003 REACTON & REFLECTION Haas Gallery, Norton, MA
2002 LIGHT WAVES Locke & Davies Gallery, London, UK
2002 FREE RANGE Old Truman Brewery, London, UK
2001 TERRA / TORI Locke & Davies Gallery, London, UK
AWARDS
2012 Paul Sack Photography Award, SFAI, San Francisco, CA
2011 Paul Sack Photography Award, SFAI, San Francisco, CA
2008 Presidential Scholarship, SAIC, Chicago, IL
2003 Beard Photography Award, Boston, MA
Doty Glasco's work utilized an archive of images, objects and artifacts found while traveling across America. The images were taken in specific geographic locations because of their unique geological conditions. They represented the essence of nature with an emphasis on the phenomena of time and its effects on the landscape’s topography. Photography played an active role as the visual archive, while the materials used mirrored the landscape’s natural movement through cycles of erosion and transformation.
Each body of work utilized landscape typology to focus on abstractions of time, using specific materials to create newly formed topography. By establishing a relationship between perception and materiality, the artists created material constructions of their perceptual responses to the land.
CV
b. 1981, New Orleans, LA / b. 1988, Chattanooga, TN
Collaborative practice, 2010–2024
EDUCATION JR DOTY
2011 MFA Photography, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
2003 BA Sociology, Wheaton College, Norton, MA
2001 BFA Photography, University of Westminster, London, UK
EDUCATION JOE GLASCO
2012 MFA Photography, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
2008 BFA Photography, School of the Art Institute Chicago, IL
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2020 TIME WARP Gospel Flat Gallery, Bolinas, CA
2018 TIMELESS ENDLESS TIME FORT LA, Los Angeles, CA
2017 VALLEY OF THE SUN Neon Heater Gallery, Ohio
2016 VALLEY OF THE SUN VOLTA NY, New York, NY
2015 TIME ALWAYS FINDS YOU CES Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2014 ROAD VOYAGE Smoking Nun Gallery, San Francisco, CA
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2020 BRIGHT GOLDEN HAZE Oklahoma Contemporary Museum, Oklahoma City, OK
2020 B-SIDES BLNS HDWR, Bolinas, CA
2019 VINTAGE VISTAS NewKartel, San Francisco, CA
2017 TRANSFIX Good Children Gallery, New Orleans, LA
2017 VALLEY OF THE SUN Neon Heater Gallery, Ohio
2016 FRESH START Arena 1 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2016 LA N CV3 Coachella Valley Art Center, Indio CA
2016 CALIFORNIA COOL Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
2016 DEEP SUPERFICIAL PERCEPTIONS CES Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2015 THE WHITE PLACE Start Art Fair, London, UK
2015 PALETTE TO PALATE Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
2015 DOUBLE VISIONS The Active Space, Bushwick, NY
2015 PERFECT STRANGERS Eighteenth Street Arts, Los Angeles, CA
2015 SEMIOSPHERES Ace Hotel, Los Angeles, CA
2014 LANDS END Miami Project, CES Gallery, Miami, FL
2014 EVERYONES TIME IS THEIR OWN Alterspace, San Francisco, CA
2013 SCENES FROM THE SOUTH Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, NY
2013 TAKE ME AWAY San Francisco Arts Commission, City Hall, San Francisco, CA
2013 THE DETROITS Aldea, San Francisco, CA
2013 MAGIC MOUNTAINS Serpentine, San Francisco, CA
2013 SOUTHERN TALES No. 308, Nashville, TN
2012 POINT OF NO RETURN Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA
2012 DAYS TO COME 5 Claude Lane, San Francisco, CA
2012 VERNISSAGE Phoenix Hotel, San Francisco, CA
2012 HOME 5 Claude Lane, San Francisco, CA
2011 MANIFEST 770 Incline Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2011 RUSH ARTISAN SERIES 5 Claude Lane, San Francisco, CA
2011 VERNISSAGE SF Winery, San Francisco, CA
2011 AMERICAN WEST? Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2011 DESERTED Still Lights Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2010 HOME IS STILL HERE Still Lights Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2010 BOLLYWED Vessel, San Francisco, CA
2009 NIGHTLAND Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2009 MOVING TOWARDS LIGHT Vessel, San Francisco, CA
2009 HANGING ONTO POWERLINES Still Lights Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2008 TERRA INFIRMA Gallery 2, Chicago, IL
2006 CANDY & CIGARETTES Unit D Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
2003 LONE GUNMEN Beard Gallery, Boston, MA
2003 REACTON & REFLECTION Haas Gallery, Norton, MA
2002 LIGHT WAVES Locke & Davies Gallery, London, UK
2002 FREE RANGE Old Truman Brewery, London, UK
2001 TERRA / TORI Locke & Davies Gallery, London, UK
AWARDS
2012 Paul Sack Photography Award, SFAI, San Francisco, CA
2011 Paul Sack Photography Award, SFAI, San Francisco, CA
2008 Presidential Scholarship, SAIC, Chicago, IL
2003 Beard Photography Award, Boston, MA