Los Angeles Solo Exhibition | October 24 - November 28, 2015
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.
From the artist:
“My last series of work explored the idea that my generation and subsequent ones are the ‘Anxiety Generation’. It talked about the way that the horrors of history had been buried over time and how the media serves as a numbing and stimulating antidote to that hidden fear. In the new series of works for ‘My Sonic Youth’ I am charting the course to that state through the rise and fall of the teenager as a social category. The work draws comparisons between the inversion of public and private space and the rise of the Internet and ‘anti-social’ media. The work also draws on a wide remit of inspiration from the prophetic song lyrics of the music of my youth, found photography including imagery from recently released Seattle Police Department photos of Kurt Cobain’s death scene, archive images of Warhol’s scars and images from internet-trash culture.
Two things happened in the first half of 1994. Kurt Donald Cobain was found dead on the floor of his greenhouse and the Fraunhofer Society released the first software MP3 encoder. In that moment physical music became digital and the teenage dream became a nightmare with its physical spaces starting their journey to becoming virtual.”