Regime Change Starts at Home

Shepard Fairey, Al Farrow, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky)

October 18 – December 6, 2008

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to announce the exhibition Regime Change Starts at Home with new works by Shepard Fairey, Al Farrow, and Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky).

Opening reception with the artists, Saturday, October 18, 6-8PM.

Shepard Fairey, internationally known for his iconic street art and graphics, will present nine new politically charged paintings and collage works on canvas and paper, including the last of three unique, large-format, hand-painted and collaged portraits of Barack Obama.

A new limited-edition print created specifically for the exhibition will accompany the artist’s unique hand-finished works. In his first exhibition in Washington, DC, Al Farrow will present welded metal sculptures of religious structures, which are composed entirely of gun parts, bullets, artillery shells, and human bone. The works form striking commentaries on the militarism embedded in the histories of the three major religions. Farrow’s Christian reliquaries (in a series ironically titled “The Trigger Finger of Santo Guerro”) and exact-scale replicas of a Jewish synagogue and a Moslem mosque are based on historical models for which Farrow assembles appropriated gun parts symbolically related to the three religions.

The exhibition will premier Paul D. Miller’s (DJ Spooky) new multimedia project, Manifesto for the People’s Republic of Antarctica, which is based on his current work on the political and environmental issues surrounding Antarctica. Miller’s installation will combine a new video work with a series of posters and graphics that comment on Antarctica as a contested continent with a long and often suppressed political history.

About the Artists

Shepard Fairey’s paintings and prints have been widely exhibited in galleries around the world,and his iconic street art, recognized worldwide under his Obey Giant identity, is now amongthe most widely known urban art of our time. His works are in the collections of the Museum ofModern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. His work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, TIME, Salon.com, The Los Angeles Times, Wired, Juxtapoz, Swindle, and many other publications. Two monographs on the artist’s work and career have been published by Gingko Press: Obey: Supply and Demand (2006) and E Pluribus Venom (2008).

Shepard Fairey will have a retrospective exhibition at the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art in February, 2009. Shepard Fairey is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Al Farrow has been a metal sculptor for 20 years, and his reliquaries and religious structures made from gun parts, bullets, and artillery shells have been exhibited in San Francisco at the Catherine Clark Gallery and in major museums. His work is in many important collections around the world, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the De Young Museum,and major private collections in New York, Germany, Italy, and Hong Kong. The De Young Museum in San Francisco will present a solo exhibition of his works in November, 2008. Al Farrow lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area.

Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) is a conceptual artist, musician, and writer based in New York. Miller’s work as a media artist has been presented in multiple venues over the past ten years, including The Smithsonian Portrait Gallery (2008), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (November, 2007), the Venice Biennale (2007), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2004), the Whitney Biennial (2001), Mass MOCA (2003/2004), and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2002). As a musician, Miller has composed and recorded a huge volume of music (with a discography of over 100 titles), and he has collaborated with musicians and composers in almost every category from hip-hop, jazz, rock, electronic, and reggae to classical and conceptual. Miller has written two acclaimed books, Rhythm Science (MIT Press, 2004) and Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on sound art and contemporary music (MIT Press, 2008). Miller is currently working on film and sound projects on Antarctica, both a feature film with original music, Terra Nova: the Antarctic Suite, and an editioned multimedia video and graphics project, Manifesto for The People’s Republic of Antarctica, which will be presented in this exhibition.

For further information, please contact Lauren Gentile, Assistant Director & Director of Sales (lauren@irvinecontemporary.com). Press and media contact: Martin Irvine, Director (martin@irvinecontemporary.com). Phone: 202-332-8767.

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