gallery.sora.
Dean Sameshima
Obsession, Retribution, Appropriation, Obliteration, Depression, Distribution, Confusion, Collaboration, Isolation, Annihilation
August 3 - August 26, 2006
Taka Ishii Gallery and gallery.sora. are pleased to announce a new project by Los Angeles based artist Dean Sameshima. Presently in Japan on a 6 month US / Japan Creative Artist Residency, Sameshima will spend his final two months working on an exhibition within the space of gallery.sora.. From Thursday, August 3, gallery.sora. will be open to the public during regular gallery hours (2-7pm) ; prior to this time, throughout the month of July, Sameshima will utilize the gallery as a space within which to create work. This working process will continue during August and visitors to the gallery may happen upon the artist at work, may find an installation in progress, or, perhaps, view a completed body of work; exhibition content will not be fixed in advance of or during the exhibition itself. There will be no opening reception; artist talk and a closing party to celebrate the conclusion of Sameshima’s residency in Tokyo as well as the close of the exhibition, on Saturday, August 26.
Dean Sameshima’s work is firmly rooted in a West Coast conceptual photographic tradition. Sameshima utilizes a conceptual vocabulary to mine intimate terrain. The artist’s structural / conceptual devices include repetition, seriality and appropriation; a selection of past photographic series includes the documentation of anonymous landscapes and architectural facades (in fact sites of covert sexual activity), the re-photography of images published in fashion magazines (objects of idealized self-identification), as well as the appropriation of “self portraits” from internet websites.
Dean Sameshima’s work has been featured in museum exhibitions including “Log Cabin”, Artists Space, New York (2005), “Will Boys be Boys?”, a traveling exhibition organized by Whitney Museum of Art curator Shamim Momim (2004-present) and “LA on My Mind : Recent Acquisitions,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2002). An artist’s monograph, “Dean Sameshima” was published in Japan by fashion label Hysteric Glamour (2002).
Saturday, 26 August : closing party 6:00-8:00pm, artist talk : 7:30pm ~
Dean Sameshima blog :http://hattenlove.blogspot.com/
This program made possible with partial support from the Japan-US
Creative Arts Program and the IHJ Artists' Forum