about tucker neel
Tucker Neel is an artist, freelance writer, and independent curator living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Embracing a polymorphous practice, Neel utilizes drawing, painting, sculpture, video, installation, and online communication to create works that investigate personal, public, and political attempts to solidify memory in a material form. To view his complete projects please visit tuckerneel.com
He holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design and a BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Occidental College. As a curator he organized exhibitions for The Regent Galleries in downtown Los Angeles and the Bolsky Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design. His work has been reviewed in the L.A. City Beat newspaper, The Tennessean, Art Week, The Nashville Scene, The L.A. Times, on artforum.com, and on Flavorpill.com.
He regularly contributes art reviews to Artillery Magazine in Los Angeles, CA and ART LIES in Houston, TX. You can read these reviews at www.tuckerneel.wordpress.com.
He founded (323) Projects in 2010. (323) Projects exists to provide a dispersed, peripatetic, and constantly accessible venue for artists of all kinds who seek to explore issues important to their respective practices. The artists involved with (323) Projects provide, create, or perform works that can be appreciated in bits and pieces, and at more than one time, in both public and private spaces, by an unseen, yet omnipresent, local and international audience. You can access (323) Projects by dialing (323) 843-4652 or (323) TIE-IN-LA. For more information visit www.323projects.com
Tucker is also Vice President for GYSTInk, an artist-run company offering software and services to artists. www.gyst-ink.com
STATEMENT
Tucker Neel Artist’s Statement
My practice explores the impulse to memorialize individual and collective experiences. My intention is to use project-specific media to create works that critically question how images, objects and events become memorable and shape nationalist and individual identity.
Many of my projects directly address the role design, decoration, and artifice, play in shaping political discourse and public opinion. In Go Balloons!, an installation from 2007, I filled a professional balloon drop net with hundreds of nearly deflated polychromatic balloons. When hung from the ceiling, this familiar yet often overlooked tool for making events more memorable, is never actualized as a balloon drop, but is left as a testament to a sad and limp potentiality, resulting in something conspicuous, funny, and a little discomforting. In other projects I alter political campaign memorabilia like buttons, banners, and confetti. In engaging with the visual trappings of souvenir objects, these works comment on how keepsakes and relics shape our memories of historical events.
As part of an ongoing research project investigating the intersections between military actions, time, and national memory, I photographed the US Marine Corps Memorial and surrounding sites near Arlington Cemetery. By subtracting the recognizable figurative sculpture of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima from the top of the USMC memorial I revealed how this structure’s enormous plinth functions as a living, ever-changing testament to never-ending armed conflict. I am currently in conversations with the Marine Corps and The US Park Service to document the future changes this monument will undergo as the US concludes and begins conflicts in the future.
I also explore how technologies such as online social networks, digital cameras, and cell phones shape individual and collective understandings of events. For Perspectives In The Crowd, I contacted over two-dozen individuals from around the world who posted their footage of Daft Punk’s 2006 performance at the Coachella Music Festival on YouTube. I compiled their footage together to highlight varying perspectives on the event. The final looping 45 min video employs sharp jumps between videos of varying quality, and a fractured soundtrack creating a jarring and overwhelming experience, especially when projected life-size in the gallery.
Confabulations, an ongoing project consisting of hundreds of small drawings I make while reacting to mundane events, addresses issues of transient and faulty memories. Each drawing has an accompanying text and, taken together, they create a semiotic game where meaning is always in flux. The drawings are exhibited in excerpted clusters and as drawings come off the wall on a weekly basis, they are replaced by more drawings, some freshly made and delivered to the gallery. I continue to make these drawings with the intention that, taken together, they form an ever-shifting memorial to an unattainable present.
I create works that critically examine contingent and contested histories, and the way these histories are made real by objects, events, and persistent narratives. Through these works I intend to activate a larger discussion about how seemingly innocuous or overlooked objects or experiences contribute to individual, and national memorial structures.