Sam Freeman Gallery Images

This one is an installation shot. The wallpaper eventually filled in that wall, and the bright packing materials through the doorway became an elegant installation of Masami Teraoka's work from the 80's. A remarkable exhibition.

Sam Freeman Gallery Show

I have been away from home for almost three months, so I've not been very attentive to blogging. My last show went up entirely without me. The installation was designed by my good friend, the curator and frequent collaborator Darin Klein. Tim Butler did his usual fantastic job installing my wallpaper and Sam Freeman and his assistant Katrina Mohn kept everything rolling along. Sam and Katrina were also kind enough to host the launch of my third book: Budget Decadence. Sam ordered his own stock of the book, so if you're out near Santa Monica and are looking for something to read stop by and pick up a copy. (They will soon be available in the usual 2nd Cannons locations.)

There is a limited edition of the book which includes a print. It's called "Decorate Your Own Room" and is an 8x10 image of an empty domestic interior with detachable suggestions for how one might choose to decorate the room. There are only three remaining as of this writing, and they are available through 2nd Cannons for $75. (this is about 90% less than a comparable edition would cost at, so a good opportunity for art on a budget.)

A Short Documentary About My Work

This video was made by a local documentarian, Steve Coiffi. Steve has worked in Hollywood, most notably on the TV series ALF (which I loved as a boy!) He started making videos of LA performance art in the 90's, and has archived some of the most important moments of that discipline during the time period. Steve is currently creating a series of short documentaries of LA based artists in association with Artillery Magazine. He followed me through three separate shows and interviewed me with my gallerist, John Knuth. My dogs, Edgar and Clara also feature prominently!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThZBfAYkV88

A continuation of the previous post. More images!

Armory Installation

These are pics of my current installation at the Armory in Pasadena, CA. It's in the old Ammunition vault, so it has thick concrete walls, and a heavy steel door hanging open. I tried to make it creepier with middle gray walls, and light bulbs hanging from cords. The room is only about 5-6 feet wide, so photographing the individual groupings of images was difficult, and is why they were all taken at an angle. (They probably would have looked worse if I had a wide enough lens!) It's a shame that I don't have better documentation of that, because Darin Klein designed the hanging arrangement, and it was really spectacular (in the sense that spectacular applies to a dark creepy little room)

David Burns recently curated me into a show at the Armory Center in Pasadena, "The Drama of the Gifted Child," which takes a look at artists who are still active 5 or so years out of grad school, a milestone generally accompanied by an enormous attrition rate. I'm actually intimidated to be in such good company, Julie Lequin, and especially Kelly Sears. For this show, I was offered the ammunition room in the armory, a long, narrow room with ragged cement walls, electric panels taking up wall space and a heavy metal door hanging open at the entrance. It really is my kind of place!

The physical space of the gallery got me thinking about secrets and compartmentalization. The images in this post are some of what came from that thought process.

I blew up an image of a little boy from a black and white school photograph. The boy was pushed to the farthest edge of the frame, and the enlargement shows the space where the original image ends, and the backing board begins. I then decided to manipulate the image in as many ways as I could come up with, and frame the pictures in found frames of different sizes.

Some of the interventions are fairly simple, spraying the figure with glow in the dark paint, so that he'll take on a ghastly green glow at nighttime. Other images have more elaborate and detailed drawings scratched into the surface of the print. I tried a new technique in which I scratch an image into the plexiglass so that the print remains intact, but it the photograph is disrupted by something that alleges protection.

While making this work I was thinking about ghosts - as a concept. Ghosts are ultimately psychological disturbances that are so profound they take on a supernatural life. They are inseparable from human psychology, devices that obfuscate the personage, acting from the deepest corners of the subconscious. (I think that's something photographs do inheretly, but that's a much longer posting than this!) My goal was to create an installation that references the psychological space of the Gothic Novel, the space where the corporeal and the imagination fight. But to frame that fight in visual terms - much like literary tricks of shadow, the figure is overcome, by the symbolic order, again and again.

These are the text wallpapers mentioned in the previous posting. There was difficulty uploading them the other night, but this is what they look like.