being living is a survey exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist David Horvitz, bringing together new works alongside selected works dating back to 1992. Horvitz’s expansive practice spans photography, performance, sound, food, gardening, artists’ books, and mail art. Across these varied media, he explores the porous boundaries between time, distance, communication, and human connection—often subverting conventional systems to reveal what is fleeting, ephemeral, and unexpected.

Drawing on Horvitz’s continued exploration of informal and poetic exchanges, the exhibition maps the journeys of oceans, sand, seaweed, flowers, branches, postcards, keys, lines of longitude, sunrises and sunsets—ephemeral materials that move quietly across unseen boundaries. Moving between natural forces and human systems, Horvitz embraces nature’s unpredictability to disrupt structured logic and reimagine our experience of time and space. He looks to evolving processes—subtle disruptions and alternative exchanges—over fixed forms. Guided by a DIY spirit, Horvitz gathers and circulates images, artifacts, and gestures through shared, often unpredictable networks—from digital platforms and libraries to gardens, postcards, and even rumors—while questioning established norms of professionalism and productivity.

Among the works featured in the exhibition is The Distance of a Day (2013), a two-channel video capturing a fleeting moment: a sunset seen by Horvitz’s mother in California and a sunrise seen by Horvitz halfway across the world, coinciding in time. The work collapses temporal and spatial distance into a shared instant, exploring themes of longing, absence, and connection. His homage to Bas Jan Ader reflects this same sense of elusive passage. In Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film(2009), presented as both film and book, a lone figure pedals into the sea, echoing Bas Jan Ader’s poetic meditation on loss and disappearance. Beyond remembrance, the work explores the boundary between influence and ownership, challenging the economic systems that seek to contain art.

Horvitz extends these ideas in somewhere in between the jurisdiction of time (2014), where Pacific waters—collected from the invisible seam between time zones—are held in hand-blown glass vessels aligned along a quiet north-south axis. Here, time flows not as a fixed metric but as a living current that crosses borders, gesturing toward alternative economies and subtle networks of exchange that resist commodification, and inviting a more shared and porous understanding of connection.

His ongoing series Nostalgia (2019–present) transforms deleted digital photographs from his archive—personal moments, mnemonic fragments, and past artworks—reprinted as vinyl texts that reflect on memory and digital impermanence. Continuing his interest in exchange, Garden Key (2025) invites visitors to trade a copy of their home key for a key to enter his 7th Avenue garden, created in collaboration with Terremoto—a space for readings, performances, and spontaneous gatherings without a fixed schedule—embracing Horvitz’s focus on alternative economies and social gestures beyond monetary value.

Also included in the exhibition is a photograph taken in 1992 by Horvitz’s grandmother, Kiyoko Maruyama, showing him as a fifth grader standing in front of the U.S. Constitution in Washington, D.C. Despite a strict no-photography rule, Maruyama—who had been incarcerated as a Japanese American during World War II—quietly took the photo. Horvitz recalls seeing the sign but letting her take the picture, trusting no one would stop her. The image carries weight: a woman once denied rights stands before the very document that failed her.

Reflecting the collaborative nature of Horvitz’s practice, being living brings together artworks and objects gifted by the artist, contributions from friends, family, and collaborators, as well as items Horvitz previously mailed or gave away and later reclaimed. Ranging from photographs and paintings to sculptures and graphic works, these works form a constellation of relationships that extends across his broader practice and participatory events he and others have organized, including those at the 7th Avenue Garden and, more recently, Café 2001 in Downtown Los Angeles.

Several works on view have been temporarily returned by recipients (see checklist for complete list), for the duration of the exhibition, including selections from the personal collections of Uta Barth and Zanna Gilbert. Barth’s collection includes hundreds of items Horvitz mailed to her over two decades, dating back to when he was her student. Gilbert’s contributions were originally sent to the Getty Research Institute—where Horvitz’s wife now works—and to MoMA in New York, where Gilbert previously worked, further blurring the boundaries between professional and personal exchange.

At JOAN, the exhibition takes shape as a living, collaborative archive. It includes Horvitz’s own sculptures, drawings, paintings, films, and mail art alongside borrowed gifts, reactivated gestures, and audience participation. Central to Horvitz’s work is the invitation to engage—to enter into a reciprocal relationship where meaning is co-produced rather than predetermined. Through an evolving network of events and exchanges, being living invites viewers to reconsider the spaces between people, moments, and meanings—and to embrace the subtle, unexpected possibilities found within those in-between places.

More information on the upcoming public programs and publication coming soon!

*

David Horvitz was born in Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works. His multidisciplinary practice explores systems of language, time, and networks, often questioning the distances—geographical, temporal, and interpersonal—that separate people and places. Using images, text, and objects, his works move autonomously through various contexts, frequently entering the intimate and everyday.

His work has been exhibited at institutions including the High Line Art, New York; MoMA, New York; the New Museum, New York; SF MoMA, San Francisco; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; HangarBicocca, Milan; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Albertinum and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden; Wende Museum, Los Angeles; La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art, Rennes; S.M.A.K., Ghent; MOCAK, Kraków; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Avignon; CRAC Alsace, Altkirch; and the Brooklyn Museum, among others. Horvitz’s work is included in numerous public and private collections, such as MoMA, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; Fonds d’art contemporain, Paris; SF MoMA, San Francisco; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, France; and the Nomas Foundation, Rome. He holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

*

Exhibition Design by Aviva Rubin
Graphic Design by Tereza Ruller
Production and Fabrication by Ian Page
Special thanks to Anne Ellegood, François Ghebaly, Laurel De George, R F Jefferies, Kathleen Kim, January Parkos Arnall, Lia Trinka-Browner, Francesca Sonora, Sarah Stocker, and Anuradha Vikram