Fabien Castanier Gallery is proud to present My Sonic Youth, the LA debut for one of the UK’s most significant post YBA artists, Stuart Semple. Semple will take over Fabien Castanier Gallery in Culver City this October with a series of new controversial artworks.
Following a traumatic near death experience as a teenager studying fine art in the English countryside, Semple has gone on to exhibit in over 15 solo exhibitions internationally in China, Italy, London and NYC. He is best known for his paintings, which present an emotive and sociological perspective on mass culture. In My Sonic Youth, Semple uses painting, sculpture, and installation to explore social concepts in addition to dissecting the psychological evolution of youth culture over the course of several decades. The artist illustrates how spaces, communication, and music have changed drastically, forcing a generation of young people into a new kind of isolation. Heavily inspired by the music of his own youth, Semple uses references from music and art history to construct a fluid visual narrative, which tells the tale of a radical social and emotional shift among youth culture.
This densely woven chronicle of generational displacement takes form in My Sonic Youth through several large-scale paintings, 3d stereogram prints, large format wallpapers, fun house distortion mirrors, large collage works on paper and sculptures. The exhibition will also be accompanied with a limited edition vinyl record, which will include a custom soundtrack featuring collaborations with several musicians. Proceeds from the vinyl sales will go to charity.
"In the tangled web of the anti-social Internet we are all responsible for ‘brand me’... All our friends are beautiful, all their lives are perfect and if we don’t project the same we are worthless. Ironically with this ability to self-direct a fluid and fluctuating image comes a catastrophic resignation of true self-control. The more loved the distorted public persona becomes the more lonely and empty our private reality becomes. In the process of losing our self, we sacrificed our physical connections, exchanging them for a manipulated distorted digital link to other fictions.” -Stuart Semple
The opening reception with the artist will take place on Saturday October 24th from 6:00 -9:00 pm. Contact the gallery for more info.