Opening reception: Saturday, April 11, 6–8pm
Blum & Poe is pleased to announce This Is Freedom?, an exhibition of recent work by Los Angeles based artist Sam Durant.
This exhibition will present a new body of Durant’s light box signs and drawings. Looping back on one another, the drawings serve as personalized indexes for the light boxes by illustrating their origins in archive photographs from Aboriginal civil rights protests in Australia and African American and Native American civil rights protests in the United States.
Durant often investigates social, historical, and political issues through sculpture, installation, photography, and drawing. He incorporates text and language that is imbued with these histories to find how the meaning is constructed and understood in society. These new signs were originally exhibited at the Sydney Biennial last year and expand on his previous signs, which drew from American civil rights demonstrations. This body highlights the parallels between US and Australian history with their shared colonial past and their oppressed Indigenous populations, and ultimately explores how historical moments can be reinstated, not only positioning one to reflect on the past, but to also to provoke a reinterpretation, and to consider the relevance in the present.
Sam Durant was born in Seattle, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Durant has had several one-person exhibitions, a selection of institutions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Kunstverein Düsseldorf; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. His work has been included in such group exhibitions as the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, California (2008); Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2008); 8 Bienal de Arte de Panamá, Panama (2008); Freedom at the Hague Sculpture Center in the Netherlands (2008); Unmonumental at the New Museum, New York (2007); the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York (2004); and the Venice Biennale, Italy (2003). This Is Freedom? marks Durant’s eighth solo exhibition at Blum & Poe.