Wavecrest P.A, 2025. archival pigment print. 5 1/4 x 4” image, 11 5/8 x 8 3/4” paper size

In the early 1970s, Craig Krull spent his childhood roaming the alleys of Venice, a young Tom Sawyer in a notoriously seedy seaside town in California. The once charming canals were rundown, and the community was a bohemian counterculture that included some of LA’s greatest artists. Krull returned to Venice in the 1980s, living on the beach while starting his career in the gallery world. Recently he returned again, living beside the canals that were once in ruin, his local Boy’s Club now a chic dress shop on Abbot Kinney Blvd. As the poet Gary Snyder said, “Our place is part of what we are."

During the pandemic, Krull began daily walks through Venice, reacquainting himself with his home. He believes that walking is an art form in itself as exemplified in the mindful and conceptual work made by British artists Richard Long and Roger Ackling. In his walks, he recognizes elements of gentrification, but the town is still as funky as ever, an unbridled and chaotic circus. He began making photographs during random, meandering walks that followed no path other than an organic trail prompted by the act of paying attention. His images include architectural perspectives, an awareness certainly founded in his art historical training, but equally indebted to years of working with photographers like Julius Shulman.

He follows palimpsests and decay, less interested in obvious “landmarks,” and unapologetically drawn to detritus, the garbage that seems to ebb and flow in the alleys every day. In fact, according to Krull, the fresh junk doesn’t just appear, it often seems to be placed and arranged with aesthetic consideration by the people who make these streets their home, particularly in the raw, visceral alley known as Speedway. Some of his images capture an explosive array of boxes, discarded furniture and colorful projectile trash like a Nancy Rubins sculpture, others are formal observations of line, space and edge as in a thoughtfully constructed Diebenkorn composition.

Walking Venice is an ongoing engagement with the peculiarities and unfolding history of a distinctive, non-conformist environment that appears regularly on Krull’s Instagram account, @krull90291. In the center of the exhibition he has installed Memento, a tower of mismatched concrete breeze blocks with a bed of sweet alyssum inside, a sculptural ode to his youth as a native Angeleno.

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