With the HOLLYWOOD sign as a scenic backdrop, Arts & Sciences PROJECTS and the JOSH magazine are pleased to announce a one-day outdoor installation of Stuart Sandford’s Cumfaces series and Blow Job video in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Home to Hollywood’s iconic visual marker, Griffith Park has a storied history as a fertile cruising area where men go to have sex with other men. Art Trunk Show Los Angeles will temporarily reclaim the park as a venue for artistic expression and personal liberty as we combine art, zines, a picnic, and (optional) cruising.
Working primarily in photography and video, UK Visual artist Stuart Sandford is currently based in New York City. Invoking keen directorial and editorial skill, his work calls to mind the tenderness and innocence of Hollywood teen heartthrobs of the 1980s, while re- appropriating and re-contextualizing these familiar icons (including Chad Allen, Corey Haim, and a young, fresh-faced Matthew Broderick) with a provocative, sexy, neo-punk aesthetic. His process challenges the notions of authorship and image-maker (Sandford draws inspiration from eighties teen fan-mags and accepts photographic contributions from others for his own projects). In his Cumface series, Sandford uses an open call process to direct his subjects to submit self-portraits of themselves on the brink of orgasm. Like a skilled director, Sandford sets the constraints for the scene and culls the best performance from his subjects, resulting in a sublimely complex series of images of youth lost in a moment of ecstasy. In Sandford’s more recent Blow Job (2009), he expands his director’s hand to video. Blow Job features a reengineered digital clip (rendered in a silent, ever-so- brief-you-might-miss-it sequence) ostensibly depicting teen heartthrob Zack Morris (Mark- Paul Gosselaar’s character on Saved by the Bell) on the receiving end of some sort of off- camera pleasuring.
Sandford’s work has been exhibited in New York, Basel, Berlin, Rome, Krakow, Brasilia, Vienna and Rotterdam. His images have appeared in numerous publications including Basso, Try State, BUTT, GT and Kaiserin magazines.
© 2009 Philip Tomaru & Martin Masetto