New York, New York, LV
Steven Walls
September 9 - October 8, 2005
Opening Reception Friday, September 9, 6 - 8 Pm
"My current investigation deals with artifice and the American landscape. The reasons a culture wholeheartedly embraces the artifice and simulation embedded within it are rarely as obvious as the artifice itself. My interest lies in a populations ability to overlook a cellphone tower camouflaged as a palm tree, while simultaneously celebrating the ham-fisted fiction of Hollywood and Las Vegas."
-- Steven Walls
For Steven Walls second solo show at Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery the artist presents three bodies of work, once again using Baudriallard's simulacra as a point of departure to investigate both the nature of entertainment and art.
Three paintings portray Las Vegas hotels - The Venetian, New York, New York and Paris, LV. each borrowing culture and appropriating history from their namesakes. Planted in the Nevada desert, an inhospitable climate becomes host to gamblers -- inciting suspension of disbelief.
Walls and collaborator John Brinton Hogan combed Southern California photographing the ubiquitous cell phone towers disguised as Palm and Evergreen trees. Posing the question what is more visually disruptive, a cellphone tower or a cellphone tower disguised as a tree?
A three channel video installation, realized with Ian Williams portrays an imagined drive through the deserts of Southern California. The desert provides the viewer with a suitable blank screen upon which to project his or her own saga.