"David Buckingham : Don't Hate Me Because I Am Beautiful"
2010-09-02 until 2010-10-02
Cain Schulte Contemporary Art
San Francisco, CA, USA United States of America

Cain Schulte Contemporary Art San Francisco is pleased to present the newest metal sculptures by David Buckingham: Don't Hate Me Because I Am Beautiful. The exhibition opens on September 2 and runs through October 2, 2010. The artist's third solo exhibition at Cain Schulte Contemporary Art addresses a variety of issues found within American culture, from gun fascination, violence and rampant capitalism to current neuroses surrounding gender, sexuality, and the attainment of beauty through artificial means. Buckingham's deceptively simple sculptures made of found metal are stunningly direct in technique yet maintain a semiotic ambiguity that is cleverly disconcerting and dispassionately humorous. His varied but incredibly cohesive work often recalls the aesthetic principles of Pop Art, text-based Conceptual Art and the mischievous theories of the Situationist International; he melds and perverts the basic tenets of these movements in an exceptionally complex and daring pastiche.

Echoes of an extensive background in advertising can be seen in Buckingham's textual work, starting from the title: "Don't Hate me Because I'm Beautiful", a line from an 80's TV commercial for shampoo, however the political correctness of commercialism is abandoned in favor of crass and uncouth statements. He takes lines from modern film classics ("Show Me the Money"), generic pornography ("Oh Baby Yeah Oh God"), classic rock and punk songs ("White Punks on Dope"), while incorporating other ubiquitous phrases that have permeated the media-saturated and spectacularized American mind. These pieces represent Buckingham's conflicted negotiation with the words that have become enmeshed in his consciousness to the point of permanent residency. They simultaneously fetishize and destabilize the ways in which the media contaminates both personal and mass consciousness. Buckingham seeks to expel these psychic phantoms, stating that "converting these random thoughts into metal is one way of exorcising the demon." Regarding the various perceptions of his art, he says "all readings of my work are valid." The viewer is left free to contemplate the playful and paradoxical nature of his work; it is a giddy celebration of, and a venomous assault on, modern American culture.

David Buckingham is a New Orleans native who now lives and works in Los Angeles. He was educated at the Rivington School in New York City, and has shown in solo and group shows in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, New York, and Chicago. His work has been included in an exhibition at the Riverside Art Museum, and in several private collections throughout the United States.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of California

Other Important Exhibitions in San Francisco