BEVERLY AND LA BREA
Beverly and La Brea is a 20-minute 4K video work centred on questions of identity, place and iconographic value. Moving beyond the personal, performative and directly human perspective that characterises Marcus Gaab’s recent work, the focus here shifts towards a more abstract, iconographic dimension of identity.
The work takes Stephen Shore’s photograph Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975 as its point of departure. At approximately the same time of year, Gaab returned to the location, researched the historical camera position and documented the intersection from a comparable perspective in high-resolution video. The soundscape developed by Adam Asnan processes original recordings made on site, extending the precise visual observation to encompass the acoustic reality of the location.
The temporal displacement of almost five decades becomes an investigation into the relationship between physical place, representation and cultural meaning, asking how a place shapes the identity of an artwork and how the artwork, in turn, influences the perception and identity of that place. Shore’s historical photograph, originally conceived as an objective, technically advanced and highly detailed documentation, has over time acquired an iconographic, cultural and financial status of its own. In its reception, America emerges as a culturally projected topography of longing, shaped by a Western-coded mythology of freedom, everyday life and surface. Beverly and La Brea takes this convergence of documentary precision, cultural imagination and aesthetic desire as a point of departure, examining how place, image and projection mutually produce one another.
The accompanying large-scale black-and-white photograph of a historical 48-star U.S. flag extends this inquiry through a national symbol of cultural identity. As an artefact of a former political and geographical reality, the flag is itself shaped today by historical distance, memory and projection. Photographed at the flag’s original dimensions of 133 × 200 cm, it becomes a material counterpart to the video, condensing its questions of identity, iconography and cultural attribution.
Together, the video and photograph form a contemplative investigation into the relationship between reality and representation, present and memory, and into the ways places, images and symbols produce and transform cultural identity over time.
ON SHOW AT FAHRBEREITSCHAFT / HAUBROK FOIUNDATION 26 September 2026
WORK DETAILS
BEVERLY AND LA BREA
Marcus Gaab, 2026
4K video, colour, sound, 20 min., loop
48 STARS
Marcus Gaab, 2026
Analogue black-and-white photograph, print, 133 × 200 cm
Historical 48-star U.S. flag
CREDITS
MUSIC / SOUNDSCAPE — Adam Asnan
COLOUR GRADING — Sarah Salzmann
