DANI TULL
THE MASTER PLAN: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
September 7 through October 13, 1996
Jessica Fredericks Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by DANI TULL. Mr. Tull has shown widely in Los Angeles and New York. Recently he was included in “The Moderns” at Feature and “Glimpse of the Norton Collection as Revealed by Kim Dingle” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. He has had several one-person exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Germany. This will be his first in New York.
Contemporary suburbia has long been dominated by Master Planned Communities in which every element has been designed and fabricated for your unabrasive residential pleasure. The results are houses, streets and neighborhoods that are by design, exact replicas of each other. Often the natural ecology has been ripped out and replaced with pert green lawns and manageable trees. Unfortunately this phenomenon is no longer unique to the US of A, currently such communities are being developed outside of Paris and Tokyo. In 1996 the perversity of this master-planned homogenization should surprise few. The interesting question now, in an age where the quiet frustration and desperation of Willy Lohman has ripened into the aggression and out-right hostility of your friendly, faceless telemarketer, is how are these homes being sold, to what are the customers attracted, and most importantly, what are the tools of the sale?
Drawing upon his own personal experiences growing up in a variety of master-planned communities in suburban southern California, Mr. Tull has been developing a major conceptual project that investigates the nature of the sale and will culminate in the sale of an actual model home. For this show, Mr. Tull has posed as a potential homeowner to gain entry and covertly photograph the interiors of decoratedmodel homes. The builders of these communities typically entice potential new home buyers with these showcase model homes, fully outfitted with demographically researched accouterments such as boys rooms filled with sports trophies and Mighty Morphine Power Ranger sheets, girls rooms with Hello Kitty posters and ornamental hairbrushes, and kitchens where real dough is baking in the oven so the house smells like home cooking. Mr. Tull is exhibiting these photographs as sculptural elements. Face mounted on Plexiglas some of the photos will be presented on prefab Formica shelving that suggest a developers promotional display and is reminiscent of the materials used within the homes. Other photos are presented in custom-made two-inch thick polyethylene foam frames--packing material which reference the saccharine promise of a future move to your new home.
Jessica Fredericks Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery by telephone at (212) 633-6555 or fax at (212) 367-9502.