With the Help of LACE, Fallen Fruit Goes Global
6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA
06/16/09
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LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) is proud to present United Fruit, the first solo show by the artists collective Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young). This exhibition premieres a new body of work generated during Fallen Fruit’s recent residency in Colombia, South America which features a series of photographs and video installations exploring the social, political and pop history of the banana.

The opening reception features Are You Happy to See Me?, a participatory performance involving hundreds of bananas available for eating. Attendees will be encouraged to photograph themselves playing with this often comical or suggestive fruit. As the most popular fruit in the world, the banana is ubiquitous in daily life — both as a food staple in grocery stores large and small as well as the supremely seductive fruit used in modern advertising and branding. At the same time the banana’s history, politics and origins have remained virtually invisible due to the remoteness of where they are grown and of the people who grow them. Fallen Fruit’s installation at LACE engages its subject in a range of bold and oblique strategies, signaling perhaps that no single history of the banana is possible.

The projects included in the United Fruit exhibition is part of a new long-term work-in-progress entitled The Colonial History of Fruit. This initiative combines the focus of Fallen Fruit’s work with the local or particular with the global, allowing the artists to juxtapose two kinds of history: the broad or “objective” and the anecdotal or “subjective.”

About Fallen Fruit:
Fallen Fruit is a collaboration between David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young. Founded in 2004, their projects range from social practice (events, performances and public actions) to photography, video and installations. Fallen Fruit deploys fruit in their work to examine social relationships, the urban space, environment and transnational capitalism. Fruit in this sense is transhistorical and crosses all classes, ages and ethnic groups. It is both ubiquitous and often invisible, yet it is also the food that appears most often in art. All of Fallen Fruitʼs projects touch on, work through or work with fruit in some manner. They state that “fruit is the lens through which we look at the world.”

About LACE:
LACE is a nonprofit contemporary art center located in the heart of Hollywood. Internationally recognized as a pioneer among art institutions, LACE curates and produces art and events that inspire the public imagination and engage with timely issues that shape local and global life.

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OPENING NIGHT:
June 16th
8pm-10pm

EXHIBITION DATES:
June 17 – September 27, 2009
Wed – Sun 12 – 6pm, Fri 12 – 9pm

For more information, please visit www.welcometolace.org or www.fallenfruit.org

via EM Staff, 2 June 2009 11:03am | |