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Press Release
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by Sean Duffy. The exhibition will be our last exhibition in the current gallery space, before we move into the new space at 6006 Washington Blvd in January 2010. Spread throughout the entire gallery, Sean Duffy presents a series of works and installations that circle around his central concern an exploration of the relationship between original and copy. Sprung from a distinctly do-it-yourself, garage tinkerer aesthetic, the sculptures and wall installations riff on a history from Kienholz to Warhol, from Ed Ruscha to Richard Prince, from Assemblage to Seriality. Recycling, re-using and circling back to previous issues, Duffy has become an expert in extracting fresh news from giving the past a spin.
Featured in the exhibition are a disco bucky-ball made from flashing fans, Buckminster Fuller inspired reading chairs made comfortable with pillows from the artists old T-shirts, a painting of a car engine on a car engine, a triple turntable pushcart that served as a palette to paint the engine, and a variety of garage jar shelves displaying elements of past sculptures and exhibitions. The formal framework for the exhibition is the tension between sculpture and painting. Many of the sculptures in the exhibition reference painting while the paintings point back to sculptures. Installed on the longest wall of the main gallery space is a large painting comprised of silk screened record covers that are serially displayed like in a record store. Featuring covers of the New York Dolls versus the X – Los Angeles alternately, the work talks about painting without being one, it speaks about music without sound, and it undercuts East Coast Pop with a hand made mom and pop approach that brings the formal language back to that of a tinkerer who is less concerned with selling his stuff than having the time of his life.
Sean Duffy received his MFA from the University of California at Irvine. His work has been featured recently in solo exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL, at the Luckman Gallery, California State University Los Angeles, CA, and at the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ. Group Exhibitions include Dont Let Me Be Misunderstood, World Class Boxing, Miami, FL; Something from Nothing, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, LA, organized by Dan Cameron; Soundwaves, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla; Lost in Music, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS; the “California Biennial”, Orange County Museum of Art, Orange County, CA; “kurzdavordanach”, Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne; “Black Belt” at the Studio Museum, Harlem, and Santa Monica Museum of Art, and exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, the Irvine Fine Arts Center, at LACE, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, and at the Nevada Institute for Contemporary Arts, Las Vegas. His work will be included in The Record, an upcoming exhibition curated by Trevor Schoonemaker at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is located at 5795 West Washington Blvd in Culver City, between Fairfax and La Cienega. Gallery Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 am – 6 pm and by appointment. Directions: Coming from downtown, take the 10 frwy west, exit at the Washington / Fairfax exit, turn left, it’s the second building on your right. 10 frwy coming from the west side, take the Fairfax exit, turn right on Fairfax, turn immediately right on Washington Blvd, the building is the second on your right, next to the Dunn Edwards store.