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Steven Wolf Fine Arts

October 10 - November 16, 2008

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2747 19th Street A San Francisco, CA 94110
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Cyanide Dustin Fosnot, Untitled, 2008, digital photograph, site-specific installation
Opening Reception: Friday, October 10, 5:30 – 7:30 For his second one-person show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco artist Dustin Fosnot has produced a theatrical installation of large-scale dust collages. They are accompanied by life-size self portraits on found mattresses made by the artist using a cyanide compound, the sun and his body to expose the image. These are documented in a short book called Cyanide produced by Steven Wolf Fine Arts in conjunction with the exhibition. In this ghostly show that conflates indoors and outdoors and ruminates in a dreamy sort of way on the urban wild, Fosnot continues to devise new ways of using unpredictable materials. The kaleidoscope of art references has broadened as well to include Jackson Pollock, Dennis Oppenheim, Yves Klein and Tony Oursler. In the past Fosnot’s work has been distinguished by broad comedy and feats of kinetic action. His carnival-like success with materials such as Styrofoam, and the toy-like forms that resulted, have obscured the vitality of his conceptual strategies and his sense of the past. In this most recent body of work those come to the fore. The dust collages are elegant rambling abstractions with the roughness and spontaneity of automatic activity. They look like photos of the starry night until the process and the nature of the materials start to peek through. The mattress works are both sculptural and photographic, and give new meaning to the tradition of street photography. They conjure up the forensic cataloging of death in the street, the 80s graffiti stencils of Richard Hambleton and offer a humorous glimpse into the artists’ fearful sense of his proximity to homelessness.