About

FALLEN FRUIT BIOGRAPHY

Fallen Fruit’s David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young coined the term ‘Public Fruit’ and began mapping fruit in public space in 2004.

Fallen Fruit is a long-term art collaboration that began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects and site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world. By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works reimagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. Public Fruit Jams invites a broad public to transform homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making as experimentation in personal narrative and sublime collaboration; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours explores the boundaries of public and private space at the edge of darkness; Public Fruit Meditations renegotiates our relationship of ourselves through guided visualizations and dynamic group participation. Fallen Fruit’s visual work includes an ongoing series of narrative photographs, wallpapers, everyday objects and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. Recent curatorial projects reindex the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing permanent collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject. David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young are the three artists of Fallen Fruit that imagine fruit as a lens through which to see the world.

BIOGRAPHY – DAVID BURNS co-founder and artist (http://www.davidburnsprojects.com)

David Burns

David Burns is a visual artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His recent video work has shown in festivals and galleries including; The Getty Center, Los Angeles, The Tate Modern/Tank.tv, London, The Armenian Museum of Experimental Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, Florean Museum of Art, Romania, and in festivals including; InsideOUT, ADD-TV, Pressplay, Mix Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, NEWFEST and others. Burns’ recent art projects have been shown at Ars Electronica, Austria, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Netherlands Architecture Institute at Maastricht, The Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, The Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, Momenta, Another Year in L.A., Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Acuna-Hansen, Bonelli Contemporary, 18th Street Arts Center, LA Freewaves, Track 16, The Armory Center for the Arts, Machine Project, WORKS, REDCAT, MESSHALL, and Artists Space. Recent reviews and publishing may be seen in The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, ArtForum, Cabinet, Paper, Rhizome, Mother Jones, Artillery, Los Angeles Magazine, READYMADE, The O.C. Weekly, The L.A. Weekly, FAB magazine, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and more. Recent curatorial projects include: BUMP, co-curated with Margie Schnibbe, EMBODIED TECHOLOGIES, co-curated with Legier Beiderman, ARTLUST, co-curated with Bruce Yonemoto, MP4-FEST and OPEN ARCHITECTURE, co-curated with Saskia Wilson-Brown. Awards include: GOODWORKS, ARTMATTERS, YouTube Featured Video, LA Weekly’s Best of L.A., Rhizome.org new media award, Yahoo! Best of the Web, Berkeley Film Festival, Best Experimental, Eye-Opener Award / 2nd City Council, The Medici Scholars Grant.

BIOGRAPHY – MATIAS VIEGENER co-founder and artist

Matias Viegener

Matias Viegener is a Los Angeles based writer, artist and critic who teaches in Critical Studies and the MFA Writing Program at CalArts. He works alone and collaboratively in writing, video, installation and performance art. He has shown solo work or performed at The Whitney Museum, The Kitchen and The Drawing Center in New York, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), New Langton Arts in San Francisco, Beyond Baroque, Machine Project, the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), The Silver Lake Film Festival, and the LaJolla Museum of Contemporary Art. He is a co-founder of Fallen Fruit (www.fallenfruit.org), which has shown work internationally in museums and galleries. He has co-edited two books, Séance in Experimental Writing and The Noulipian Analects with Christine Wertheim, with whom he directs a series of international experimental writing conferences annually at REDCAT in Los Angeles. He is the editor and co-translator of Georges Batailles’ The Trial of Gilles de Rais. He has published fiction and criticism in Black Clock, Bomb, Artforum, Art Issues, ArtUS, Artweek, Afterimage, Cabinet, Cargo, Critical Quarterly, High Performance, Framework, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, American Book Review, Fiction International, Radical History Review, Paragraph, Semiotext(e), Suspect Thoughts, and X-tra, for whom he regularly writes on visual art. His criticism appears in the anthologies Queer Looks: Lesbian & Gay Experimental Media, and Camp Grounds: Gay & Lesbian Style. He also has fiction in the anthologies Men on Men 3, Sundays at Seven, Dear World, Vital Signs and Discontents, edited by Dennis Cooper.

BIOGRAPHY – AUSTIN YOUNG co-founder and artist (http://www.austinyoung.com)

Austin Young

Austin Young is a portrait photographer and video artist based in LA since 1985, He’s created an encyclopedic documentation of sub and trans culture in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. His work has expanded to include performative collaborations with the public. He is co-founder of the art collectives Fallen Fruit and TRANIMAL. In ‘TRANIMAL Workshop,’ gallery attendees go through a conveyor belt of artists to be transformed into genderless expressions of the subconscious. In his recent solo show, YOUR FACE HERE, the public became the subjects, via portraiture, of his show. Young’s work has been featured in Vogue, 7Hollywood,Flaunt and Interview Magazine, and shown at LACMA, Matadero Madrid, Ars Electronica, WOW Storefront Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum, the Hammer and Stephen Cohen. He recently broke attendance records at LACMA with his collaborators Fallen Fruit and received praise for Tranimal 2010 at the Hammer Museum as “One of 2010’s Top Ten fashion trends in LA” – Lina Lecaro, LA Weekly.