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Electric Works

July 16 - August 15, 2010

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1360 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94103
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Arboretum Music of the Future
Artist reception: Friday July 16, 6-8 PM Electric Works is pleased to present drawings from David Byrne's "Arboretum" series. At first glance, these seemingly simple pencil-on-paper drawings look like sketches or notes taken during a business meeting or a biology class. They quickly reveal themselves to be carefully wrought diagrams (often in "tree" format) illuminating the relationship of objects, concepts and connections from our everyday lives. Those familiar with Byrne's lyrics and other writing will feel at home among these drawings, which in an odd way feel very much like instructions for writing songs. Often linking two disconnected worlds these charts feel like a lost chapter from a never-printed Encyclopaedia Brittanica. In Byrne's own words: "Drawing/diagrams (mostly) in the form of trees, which both elucidate and obfuscate the roots of contemporary phenomena and terminology. Sort of like borrowing the evolutionary tree format and applying it to other, often incompatible, things. In doing so a kind of humorous disjointed scientism of the mind heaves into view." David Byrne (b. 1952, Dumbarton, Scotland) was raised in Baltimore where he briefly attended the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) after transferring from the Rhode Island School of Design before forming the group Talking Heads, who introduced an innovative visual approach to their performances. Byrne has been involved with photography and design since college and has been publishing and exhibiting his work for the past decade. Like his music, Byrne’s visual work has the capacity to elevate and transform ordinary elements into iconic ones and challenges our fundamental notions of what can be classified as art. His projects also focus on the relationship between our physical exteriors and emotional interiors. Byrne’s work belongs to numerous collections, including the Denver Art Museum and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C. His book projects include True Stories (1986); Strange Ritual (1995); Your Action World (1998, 1999); The New Sins/Los Nuevos Pecados (2001); David Byrne Asks You: What Is It? (2002); Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information (2003); Arboretum (2006); and Bicycle Diaries (2009). Current updates of musical, visual and other projects can be found at www.davidbyrne.com . Byrne lives and works in New York City.