East, London
Dean Sameshima
Wonderland
Soft OpeningSoft Opening present Dean Sameshima’s second exhibition with the gallery. “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.” Dean Sameshima (b. 1971, Torrance, CA) works across a variety of forms including photography, collage, and found imagery. In 2024, Sameshima was included in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Soft Opening recently published being alone on the occasion of a solo exhibition of the same title at the gallery in London (2024) and a new book focused on two ongoing series’ of photographs will be published by 5b in Glasgow later this year. Recent exhibitions include The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach (2025); Good or Trash, Paris (2025, solo); Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (2025, solo); Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2025); PPOW, New York (2024, solo); California Museum of Photography, Riverside (2024); ICA, Los Angeles (2024); Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2023); Queer Thoughts, New York (2023, solo); Queer Public Space at Museum of Sex, New York (2023) and at Amtsalon, Berlin (2023). Sameshima’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford. He was the 2022 recipient of The Artist Acquisition Club Award. The artist lives and works in Berlin.