Jesse Sugarmann, Wake Up Sleeping Giant

ALL RISE is pleased to conclude a year-and-a-half of programming with an artist we have had in mind from the first germinations of the project. September 25 and 26, Jesse Sugarmann will present an installation of four video and sculptural works from his recent “Wake Up Sleeping Giant” series. The works investigates a Connecticut land mass called Sleeping Giant, SITE’s 1978 installation Ghost Parking Lot, and the sculptural possibilities of vivisepulture (live burial). Previous elements of this series have been exhibited at Space 4 in San Diego, CA and The Grammar Center in Medford, OR.

Public Programs: September 25 and 26, 6pm- 10pm (all ages 6-8pm, 21+ after 8pm). 1250 Denny Way, Seattle

Based in Bakersfield, California, Jesse Sugarmann has long explored culture and commodity through the lens of the American auto industry. The artist’s fascination with the potentiality of his material is at the heart of his practice: cars balance and fall or teeter to imply a fall... are buried or obscured. Sugarmann explores auto components as sculptural objects and the car’s demands on infrastructure and production as pattern (in both a two dimensional plane and a fully articulated choreography). His video experiments have involved American landscapes as players, from Pacific Northwest forests to the California desert and the vacancy of suburban car dealerships. This tendency to contemplate land is particularly paramount in the Wake Up Sleeping Giant series, including video experiments the artist describes as “challenges to the visual dominance of the horizon.”

Sugarmann has exhibited with venues such as the Getty Institute, Los Angeles; el Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon; the Banff Center, Canada; Filmbase, Ireland; the 21C Museum, Louisville; Human Resources, Los Angeles; and both the Paris and Berlin instances of this year’s Les Recontres Internationales. He is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland.

“Sitting in the Back of a Car" by Chip Lord, The Architect’s Newspaper, July 2014

“Doing Battle with the Remains of Industrial America" by Christian Frock, Hyperallergic, May

“Jesse Sugarmann,” John Motley, Frieze Magazine, March 2014