Soft Opening announces Dean Sameshima’s second exhibition with the gallery, Wonderland, opening Thursday 26 March from 6—9pm.
“I don’t think I ever thought much about sadness
as a theme or something that propelled me…
maybe more fear than sadness. Maybe they are
linked? Like the sex clubs. I photographed them
while they were still open for business, they
just happened to close down a few years after
my series was complete, but I feared this might
happen and what would happen once they
closed? What safe place would we have then?
Back to the streets? The parks? Tea rooms? All
these potentially violent spaces. So the fear of
losing something (I found lots of value in), was
perhaps a strong emotion for me. I am not a
naturally optimistic person at all.”
—Dean Sameshima, 2014
In Wonderland, seven images commemoratively document the exteriors of queer sex clubs and bathhouses in Silverlake, Los Angeles. Titled after a group of four series of photographs that Sameshima exhibited as his first mature body of work from 1995-7, these original hand-printed works constitute the only remaining complete set of these images outside those collected by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the late 1990s. The additional three series these photographs were originally exhibited alongside, include documentation of drawings found inside various public restrooms used for anonymous sex in Los Angeles, known colloquially at the time as “tea rooms”; abandoned WWII underground army bunkers in Palos Verdes that men would cruise in during the daytime; and specific sites in Griffith Park in Los Angeles and Harbour City Recreational Park in Lomita, which were both notorious cruising areas. Wonderland includes a group of these cruising sites alongside the exterior urban architecture of the sex clubs to mark the first time a substantial group of these works has been shown together since exhibitions at Hamburg Kunstverein, Tate Modern and the Centro Cultural Tijuana in the early 2000s.
Now representative of lost time and place, at the time Sameshima prefigured a kind of grief in his images, photographing these sites during the day, unpopulated and virtually unrecognisable. In the catalogue accompanying Public Sex, a survey exhibition of Sameshima’s work in 2014 at She Works Flexible in Houston, curator Andy Campbell detailed the personal significance of these works for the artist: “In the mid-1990s Sameshima began photographing the cruising grounds that he covered as a teenager and a young man in and around Los Angeles… These photographs of places without people lay out one of the core concerns of Sameshima’s artistic career: the politics of identification as evidenced through the tension between surveillance and concealment – especially concerning sex in public and semi-public spaces.”
