Dates: Mar 26 – Apr 23, 2005

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery debut solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist Dean Sameshima. Sameshima’s work has been featured in museum exhibitions including “Log Cabin,” Artists Space, New York (2005), “Will Boys Be Boys?” a travelling exhibition organized by Whitney Museum of Art curator Shamim Momim (2004/2005) and “LA on My Mind : Recent Acquisitions,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2002). An artist’s monograph, “Dean Sameshima,” was published in Japan by fashion label Hysteric Glamour (2002).

Dean Sameshima’s work is firmly rooted in a West Coast conceptual photographic tradition. A member of a younger generation of artists studying under instructors including Christopher Williams and Stephen Prina, Sameshima utitlizes a conceptual vocabulary to mine intimate terrain. Sameshima’s structural /conceptual devices include repetition, seriality and appropriation; a selection of past photographic series includes the documentaion of anonymous landscapes and architectural facades (in fact sites of covert sexual activity), the re-photography of images published in fashion magazines (objects of idealized self-identification), as well as the appropriation of “self portraits” from internet websites. The artists’s project may be understood as an attempt to examine pesonal desires through the photogaphic image and its varied histories.
Taka Ishii Gallery will exhibit Sameshima’s series, “Young Men At Play,” a set of 13 color photographic prints. Exhibited images were originally published in amateur magazines illegally distributed in America ca.1960’s. The exhibition is modeled formally on these publications: images included in the original publications were likely themseleves “appropriated” from a variety of pre-existing sources, all exhibited images are printed in monochrome -in the fashion of the original, inexpensively produced one-color publications. In addition to exhibited works, Taka Ishii Gallery will co-publish and distribute (with Peres Projects, Los Angeles) a free-paper exhibition catalogue. The exhibition and catalogue distribution themselves constitute an outlaw act given exisitng censorship laws in Japan and the current conservative political climate in the United States. This recent body of work is motivated, in part, by the artist’s will to assert and examine the continued existence of underground culture as one amongst multiple “gay cultures”.