Peter Holzhauer
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COPYSTAND,
THE MARINE LAYER and
LOS ANGELES CLASS
Based in Los Angeles, Peter Holzhauer guides
our attention to the accidental, the presence of
well-intentioned but unfortunate urban planning,
misplacement and even defacement of the natural
setting. Like a visual anthropologist, Holzhauer
surveys the city and countryside for signs of what
has become of us – the consequences of our use of
the land becoming the fabric of our environment. In
Holzhauer’s deadpan portrayal of the metropolis, daily
ironies sharpen under perpetual sunshine: the clash
of prosperity and destitution, the jumble of nature and
man-made, the presence of nostalgia. He introduces
claims on the local terrain by individuals we will never
see or know. We are reminded of being products of our
surroundings, even as life feels largely accidental. How
we perceive these accidents of incident, and how we
learn from them, determines the future.
BIOGRAPHY
Peter Holzhauer lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at Pratt
Institute, New York and Massachusetts College of Art and Design,
Boston before receiving his B.F.A. from the Art Institute of Boston,
and his M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. His
photographs are in the permanent collections of the Boston Public
Library, the Boston Athenaeum, and the George Eastman House,
Rochester, New York. Holzhauer is a recipient of D’Arcy Hayman
Award, Bill Muster Foundation Award, and Hoyt Scholarship. He is
currently an instructor of photography at Cerritos College, Norwalk.
His work has been in recent group exhibitions at the New
York Photo Festival in Brooklyn; Piero Gallery in Orange, New
Jersey; Phantom Gallery in Pasadena, California; and the Portland
Museum of Art, in Maine.