BIRTHPLACE:   Washington, DC BIRTH YEAR:   1980 LIVES IN:   Los Angeles, CA

WORKS IN:   Los Angeles, CA WEBSITE:   http://www.tuckerneel.com REPRESENTING GALLERIES:   Commissary Arts

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, The Nashville Scene, The L.A. Times, on artforum.com, and on Flavorpill.com.

Commissary Arts in Venice, CA provides Tucker with representation (www.commissaryarts.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 is also Marketing Manager for GYSTInk, an artist-run company offering software and services to artists. www.gyst-ink.com

STATEMENT

My practice explores the memorializing impulses and aspects of communication that underpin everyday experiences and permeate the fabric of social and nationalist ideology. I utilize project-specific media, primarily drawing, sculpture, video, installation and the Internet to critically examine the rehearsed texts, hidden objects, lapses in judgment, jumbled narratives, and creases in history that implore us to remember and allow us to forget how we got to the present time in the first place.

My earlier work investigated how objects pertinent to national political discourse stand in for memory and shape public opinion. I constructed a rickety wooden teleprompter to record people reading famous speeches by political leaders. When watching videos of these unfamiliar faces stumbling through important and familiar texts displayed on the teleprompter itself, the viewer is invited to question how the ability to recite a text, seemingly from memory, places one in varying positions of authority and power.

Just before the mid-term elections in 2006 I recorded every US senator’s answering machine message. Using small contact speakers attached to balloons arranged in a column in the gallery, I played these recordings so that as the balloons deflated, the accompanying voices of senate secretaries and congenial congressmen got fainter and fainter, almost silent. This work functions as a temporary monument to political and personal absence: the absence of a person who has to leave a message that stands in for a real conversation, and the absence of a politician who, for whatever reason, has to have someone or something else stand in for them.

Continuing my investigation into how objects aid in establishing presence, I appropriated photographs of memorializing objects like buttons, t-shirts and snow globes and removed all specific information from these souvenir products. Through this process of removal of telling information, the work explores how certain objects stand in for one’s experience of a specific place and time and questions if indeed this substitution allows for access to real unmediated memory.

Utilizing familiar yet playful design conventions, I created proposals for monuments and memorials, like an obelisk, triumphal arch, and grand statuary made out of balloons to challenge traditional ideas that memorials and monuments are supposed to be solid and solemn. In complimentary work, I filled a professional balloon drop net with hundreds of deflated polychromatic balloons. When hung from the gallery ceiling this object is never actualized as a balloon drop but is left as a testament to a sad and limp potentiality. This familiar yet often overlooked spectacle tool used to heighten a memorable experience, is made conspicuous, funny and a little discomforting.

As part of an ongoing research project investigating the intersections between personal and nationalist 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 also very invested in exploring how new developing technologies such as internet social networks, digital cameras and cell phones assist in the sharing of personal experiences in a very public forum. In one project addressing these concerns, 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 without regard to any specific timeline but instead to highlight their varying perspectives on the event. With sharp jumps between videos of varying quality and with a fractured soundtrack taken directly from videos that cut in and out, the resulting video was fractured and jarring. When projected life-size in the gallery, the final looping 45 min. video reunited its diverse DIY documentarian creators in a separate, incongruous location. This installation and its effect on visitors, who often stayed to watch the work in its entirety, spoke volumes to how new technologies are influencing the ways we communicate and share our memories with each other.

My most recent ongoing project consists of hundreds of small 5.5 × 8.5 inch drawings I make during the unmemorable moments that comprise my spare time. These drawings are adamantly heterogeneous, avoiding any specific drawing style; they are full of both simple and ornate images, sometimes teetering on the edge between the illustrative and the conceptually reductive. Each drawing has an accompanying text and, taken together, they create a sort of semiotic game where meaning is always in flux. Concurrently, they speak in many tongues, make jokes, ruminate on the past, and wish for things in the future. They excavate the absurd, libidinal and unseen realities that rumble beneath every private and public social interaction and reflect the fickle and constantly changeable nature of one’s day-to-day experience. The drawings are exhibited in excerpted clusters, according to the desires of myself, the gallery director, curator, or any number of other invited guests, thus highlighting the subjective specificity of one’s understanding of another person’s experience. As drawings come off the wall on a weekly basis they are replaced by a stream of others, some freshly made and delivered to the gallery. As a constantly changing installation, the work functions not as a diary, but instead as an ever-shifting, faulty and transitory memorial to an unattainable present.