[Click to zoom] Left, La Super-Rica Taqueria by Patricia Houghton Clarke; right, Mira Lunch Bar by Brett Leigh Dicks
“This is the perfect time to create art, right? With the current sociopolitical climate, you couldn’t be anywhere better to create meaningful work,” said Brett Leigh Dicks, whose photography exhibit FARE TRADE, a collaboration with Patricia Houghton Clarke, opens on Friday, March 21, at the Architectural Foundation Gallery.
The pair — whose professional relationship and friendship goes back to a 2008 exhibition in Santa Maria’s Betteravia Gallery and Santa Barbara’s Channing Peake Gallery called The Essential Worker — have both long embraced the notion of shining their unique lens on everyday life in a way that’s both unique and thought-provoking. Those characteristics can certainly also be attributed to the work on view in FARE TRADE, which pairs Clarke’s photographs of taquerias in Central California with Dicks’s photographs of lunch bars in Western Australia.
While The Essential Worker focused on portraits of people and FARE TRADE focuses on architecture, both bodies of work share themes involving immigration and social justice. The lunch bars, as the longtime Santa Barbaran and Independent contributor Dicks explained via Zoom from his current home in Australia, are a common phenomenon in that part of the world. “They’re in industrial areas. It’s where people go, you know, to get lunch. So, they open early, they close mid-afternoon, and they basically feed the working class.”…