Opening reception: September 11, 6–8pm
Blum & Poe is pleased to announce “Involved,” an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles based artist Sam Durant.
Durant’s art explores the complexities and contradictions of our current political situation and the need to understand oneself as a part of it, both affected by it and able to affect it. The works in the show are formally divided into three groups; large color photographs of protestors and demonstrators printed on clear film and mounted on mirrors, graphite drawings, and sculptures that utilize materials such as rocks, debris, text, mirrors, concrete and fiberglass.
The works focus on the act of hurling rock and debris, a tactic employed throughout history by the oppressed, powerless and disenfranchised. He investigates not only the gesture itself but also its symbolic implications of resistance, rage and release. In an attempt to work through the problems of representation and aestheticism of political action, Durant makes the viewers aware of their own personal relationship to what they are looking at and sets up a discursive field whereby they can understand themselves as part of this on going struggle.
Durant’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center and the Stedlijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, Belgium. His work has also been included in the Venice Biennale 2003 and this year’s Whitney Biennial. He has also co-curated (with Chrissie Iles) a program of films entitled “WAR! Protest in America, 1965-2004,” (August 26th-October 24th, 2004) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The program will also screen at the REDCAT Theatre located at the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles this fall. The exhibition “Involved” marks his sixth solo exhibition at Blum & Poe.