DOWNTOWN LA

Lane Barden

This Was the Landscape of Our Innocence

May 2 - June 28, 2026

Opening reception: Saturday, May 2, 6-9pm

"Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like."
— Anton Chekov

LOS ANGELES—Track 16 Gallery is pleased to announce the May 2nd opening of Lane Barden’s This Was the Landscape of Our Innocence at our Downtown gallery at 1206 Maple Avenue, Suite 100 on the 1st Floor of the Bendix Building. Coinciding with this solo exhibition is the featuring of Barden’s large digitally manipulated work View from the Seventh Street Bridge in the inaugural exhibition at the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, opening to the public on May 6. You are invited to join for the artist reception on Saturday, May 2 from 6-9pm. The exhibition continues through June 28, 2026.

This Was The Landscape of Our Innocence is presented in two symmetrical installations: Our Yosemite and My Blue Ridge, each consisting of a nine-panel grid in hand-crafted hardwood frames, eight “Posters” and two text panels. The text panels are narrative accounts Barden composed, pairing the violent forced removal of the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma with the brutal ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and the forced removal of the Paiute Indians from Yosemite Valley with the barbaric, pointless invasion of Iraq. 

Barden’s My Blue Ridge text opens with the artist’s confession that the Blue Ridge home of his youth provided a sense of American innocence that was soon proven to be false. It was also where Barden became an itinerant finish carpenter, a craft he returned to in a woodshop on San Fernando Road where he designed and milled the frames for the grids in American hardwoods, with pin-striped inlays in blue and red epoxy.

This 58-piece photo-based conceptual work explores the poetic resonance between the mythic democratic American landscape, our colonial aggression here and abroad, and our commitment to endless war. The show also introduces The SuitMasters, a series of 12 digitally manipulated surrogate figures who, dressed in suits, “perform authority, without accountability”, and a suite of eight composited images entitled War in Yosemite, a satire on our obsession with armaments and war.

For questions and inquiries, please contact us at gallery@track16.com.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Lane Barden is an artist, educator and architectural photographer based in Los Angeles, CA with an M.F.A. in Photography from the University of New Mexico. While his original influence was the classic black and white landscape photography of Edward Weston, Paul Strand and Paul Caponigro, his exposure to conceptual art in graduate school shifted his orientation to more contemporary work. In Los Angeles, his strongest influences were Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman, and Judy Fiskin. He was a darkroom and digital assistant to Judy Fiskin from 2004 to 2006.

While teaching at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he received grant funding for Linear City, his project to photograph linear trajectories in the Los Angeles landscape from a helicopter. That project consists of 131 photographs and was purchased in 2013 by the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center. 75 of those images were published in the urban studies anthology Infrastructural City by ACTAR Publications in Barcelona, Spain. In 2019, the L.A. River segment of the project was shown at The Getty Research Institute in the comprehensive group show: Monumentality, with notable artists such as Ed Ruscha, Tacita Dean, Reyner Banham, and Theaster Gates.

His serial piece 23 Catcher’s Masks was purchased by the Leonard and Marjorie Vernon collection, later bequeathed to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He also has work in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the New Mexico State University of Fine Arts. Three pieces from the series Riverwork were acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2020, one of which will be shown in the upcoming Inaugural Exhibition for the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA.