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Steven Wolf Fine Arts

May 7 - June 21, 2009

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2747 19th Street A San Francisco, CA 94110
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You Feel Me? Rebel Without a Cause Digital c-print (self-portrait as james Dean), 2008, please contact gallery for price
Reception Friday, May 8 2008, 5:30-7:30 In his first show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Tim Sullivan gets serious about playing his favorite role—the artist Tim Sullivan. That should be easy. The 35-year-old has a face right out of central casting—part Andy Warhol, part David Hockney—and he has made his performing self the subject in most of his previous work. Yet in many of those images he is also strangely absent. This is the paradox that fuels his art and in a new body of work Sullivan has engineered a process that dissects this contradiction with new clarity, producing a stream of photos and videos that conjoin the narcissism of art stardom with the slipperiness of personal identity. Sullivan starts with a movie performance such as James Dean's in Rebel Without a Cause, then breaks it down into its sequential emotional moments—anger, happiness, resentment, whatever. He then reenacts those emotions one at a time inside a photo booth until he has captured the entire performance in a series of self-portraits. These end up as long, elegant strips, crisp, analytical grids and thick, monotonous flip books, representing both Sullivan's performance and the original—the presence and the absence in this work.