Downtown, Los Angeles
Tim Sullivan
Lawns of Dawns
VacancyLawns of Dawns, an installation by Tim Sullivan in the basement at Vacancy, takes a look at the darker sides of art production. Art historians have suggested that historical painters such as Goya and Caravaggio suffered from exposure to lead white paint, perhaps influencing the morbidity of their late work. Sullivan conflates artistic moodiness with the toxicity of artists' materials, specifically the depressive psychological effects of lead poisoning, or saturnism. Sullivan looks to the singer Nico as a paradigm of the saturnine artist, a model and pop musician who spurned greater fame to make abrasive, experimental and commercially unviable music. Casting lead and bismuth in his studio, Sullivan has played Nico's proto-goth 1968 album, The Marble Index, into the casts, both deforming their surface and embedding audio into their forms. Sullivan then connects audio of the same record to the objects, essentially using them as speakers to play back the tinny noise it has absorbed. The objects include mementos from the artist's childhood, tongue-in-cheek references to Nico, and a new miniature book, The Saturnists, in which Sullivan has engraved text, one letter at a time, into its lead pages. Tim Sullivan is a multimedia artist working in video, photography, performance, sculpture and installation. Sullivan is the co-host of the art related variety podcast Kunstcapades as well as What is Art? LIVE!, a public access television show that he created with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has had solo exhibitions in Singapore, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Ireland and Poland and has been featured in the Havana Biennial, The Portobello Film Festival and the California Biennial.