Gallery Exhibition:
Chaos, Held

Jul 26 - Aug 5, 2027

Patton-Malott Gallery

Chaos, Held Gallery Exhibition will be on view at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado from June 26 to August 5, 2027. 

The Gallery Reception will be held July 27 2027, from 5 to 6PM in the Patton-Malott Gallery. 

Over nearly three decades, Alex Hedison has returned to certain forms, patterns, and ways of seeing, often without realizing how deeply they connect.

Chaos, Held traces these visual threads across photographs made in different places and at different moments in time, from early self-portraits and images made through screens and windows to photographs of spaces in transition and the Malibu landscape following the fires of 2026. Seen together, the works reveal an unexpected continuity: a visual language that has remained recognizable even as the artist’s subjects, materials, and approaches have evolved.

Alex Hedison has long been drawn to the spaces between things: between seeing and obscuring, remembering and reconstructing, destruction and renewal. Window coverings, reflections, plastic sheeting, architectural structures, and shifting landscapes become both subjects and filters, shaping what can be seen and what remains out of reach while highlighting the act of looking as an integral part of the image.

In Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (2012), the artist returns to a landscape photographed over several years, tracing its physical changes while considering the instability of memory and the impossibility of recovering a place as a fixed or singular experience. In other works, including photographs made from inside car washes, the world dissolves into color, light, and abstraction. These images hold viewers within a moment of transformation, suspended between what is passing and what might emerge.

The exhibition culminates in The Conditions of Exposure (2026), a series of recent double-exposure self-portraits made alongside photographs of Malibu after the fires. Here, the figure and the landscape occupy the same image, their boundaries overlapping and becoming difficult to separate.

The title Chaos, Held speaks to photography’s capacity to hold a fragment of a world that is continually changing, without resolving its contradictions or fixing its meaning. To hold is not necessarily to contain or control; it can also mean to sustain, to pay attention, or to remain present within uncertainty. A photograph preserves something even as it reveals how much is unstable, obscured, or already disappearing. Across these works, Alex Hedison returns to the structures—both physical and psychological—that shape our understanding of the world, and to the things we carry with us as that world changes.

Looking across these works, Alex Hedison recognizes how the same visual patterns have persisted through shifting subjects, materials, and approaches. Chaos, Held brings these connections into view, finding a kind of continuity not in the resolution of change, but in the act of looking closely at it, and in the possibility of transformation that remains within uncertainty.

Artists

Alex Hedison

Film Maker

Alex Hedison (b. 1969, Los Angeles, CA) is a contemporary fine art photographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Working across analogue and digital photography, as well as camera-less processes, including chemigrams, Hedison explores the relationships between perception, memory, and change. Her work examines spaces of transition through recurring patterns, geometric forms, reflections, and layered imagery, challenging the boundaries between what is visible and obscured. Hedison received her BA from Antioch University in 2021 and previously studied at UCLA and SUNY Purchase. Since 2017, she has presented solo exhibitions at H Gallery, Paris; Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles; and Shinsegae Gallery, Seoul. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in the permanent collections of the Getty Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. In 2024, Hedison directed ALOK, a documentary short film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received awards at the Sarasota Film Festival and NewFest in New York City.

Learn More