"My car got towed," Mike Mills told Jarod Taber on the sidewalk outside Authorized Dealer in Silver Lake. Mills drives a RAV4. He also has two artworks inside, in a show that takes its title from his 2010 film, Beginners, curated by Aaron Stern.
Stern is the New York photographer and curator behind a run of exhibitions arguing, with increasing clarity, for photography as a physical thing — oversized xeroxes, clusters of prints, collaged magazine cutouts. Authorized Dealer, Taber's Los Angeles project room, is where that argument lands: concrete floors, acrylic-sandwiched works held up with screw heads, prints pushpinned to the wall. Beginners brings together ten artists working across collage, photography, and video, including Christopher Anderson, Amber Pinkerton, Rebekka Deubner, Stef Mitchell, and Mills himself.
Mills' two pieces are the easiest place to start because of their scale and use of paint. They are not collages in the traditional sense of cut paper layered together. Instead found images in conversation with each other — a leopard, a smoke-blackened cityscape, a Rodin sculpture, mid-century Hollywood portraits — sit adhered to the large piece of paper alongside painted areas of acrylic that neither overlay nor erase them. The paint isn't editing. It's keeping the photographs company. There's something cinematic in this layout, which makes sense from a filmmaker: image and paint, frame by frame. What's rare is seeing a filmmaker willing to show something this provisional.
Stef Mitchell's eight works sit at the opposite end of the gallery. Both artists work in fragments, but where Mills accumulates, Mitchell isolates. Mostly white paper, mostly mark making, each centered on its substrate. The collages are like small constellations — a photograph, a magazine scrap, a pencil mark, a strip of tape — floating in deliberate emptiness. They hang as abstract mind maps, groupings of memories without translation. The refusal of composition is the composition. This is exactly the kind of working surface most photographers would never let leave the studio, and that's the point: Mitchell is collapsing the distance between the working image and the finished one.
Which is, in the end, what Beginners is actually about. The film's title refers to late-life self-revision — Mills' father coming out at seventy-five — and the show inherits that posture honestly. Photography, here, is offered as a medium still in the middle of figuring itself out, not as a closed repertoire of finished pictures. The hang reinforces it. Nothing is precious. Everything is pinned.
Aaron Stern is having a moment. On the evidence of this show, the moment is earned.
Beginners, curated by Aaron Stern
May 9th - June 7th, 2026
Featuring works by: Mark Borthwick, Tess Petronio, Mike Mills, Christopher Anderson, Chris Rhodes, Stef Mitchell, Amber Pinkerton, Vince Aletti, Rebekka Deubner, and Jim Mangan.
1741 Silver Lake Blvd. Los Angeles, CA, 90036
Open by appointment.
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