Opening reception: Friday, September 28, 6–8pm
Blum & Poe is pleased to announce our seventh solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Dave Muller.
Dave Muller is endlessly fascinated with music in all its forms and everything it permeates, from the graphic residue that is the subject of his artwork – record sleeves, CD cases, disco balls, iPods – to his curatorial role as a deejay. His work is a visual depiction of his musical obsession, charting how music infiltrates and shapes our realities and serving as a portrait of its cultural impact.
Muller’s current body of work uses the final chorus line from the Beatles song She Loves You as a starting point to reveal as much about the hype of “Beatlemania” as the decade itself. Presented as a musical timeline from 1962 to 1970, the exhibition aurally and visually chronicles the Top 100 hits from each of those years through nine rooms within the exhibition. Utilizing computers as jukeboxes, Muller conjures brief moments of time travel, letting each song relive part of its former life. Interestingly, the Top 100 were not the radio hits of the 1960’s. Progressive rock music had not yet replaced Sinatra-era standards, emphasizing the discrepancy between what was charted and what our memories recall. Further enhancing this revelation are Muller’s works on paper, which are selectively placed throughout the rooms. His unique painterly style – loose and whimsical, yet deliberate and factual – depicts appropriated images familiar and forgotten. Together with the room’s music, Muller’s environment pits cultural nostalgia against reality, creating a reconsidered portrait of the decade.
Dave Muller was born in 1964 in San Francisco and lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including solo shows at the Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Castilla y León, León, Spain; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO. Recent group exhibitions include The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Rock-Paper-Scissors, Pop Music as Subject of Visual Art, Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Augstria; and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL.