About
BIOGRAPHY:
David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit creates beautiful and sumptuous spaces where audiences can enjoy museum collections in new, unexpected ways that simultaneously reveal a series of layered social constructs. Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration originally conceived in 2004 by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Since 2013, David and Austin have continued the collaborative work. This Art project began in Los Angeles by creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property. The work of Fallen Fruit includes photographic portraits, experimental documentary videos, and site-specific installation artworks. Using fruit (and public spaces and public archives) as a material for interrogating the familiar, Fallen Fruit investigates interstitial urban spaces, bodies of knowledge, and new forms of citizenship. From protests to proposals for utopian shared spaces, Fallen Fruit’s work aims to reconfigure the relationship of sharing and explore understandings of what is considered both — public and private. From their work, the artists have learned that “fruit” is symbolic and that it can be many things; it’s a subject and an object at the same time it is aesthetic. Much of the work they create is linked to ideas of place and generational knowledge, and it echoes a sense of connectedness with something very primal – our capacity to share the world with others. find us on Instagram @fallen_fruit
“We believe everyone is a collaborator in making something special – even the stranger or passerby. We believe that “artwork” has a “resonant effect.” Fruit is a universal gift to humanity and fruit is always political.” – David Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit
Fallen Fruit has been recently featured in 15 Los Angeles Artists to Watch, ARTnews (Cover); Artforum (Critic’s Pick), “Tasty and Subversive Too”, The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler “18 -best shows in London”, “Food Matters” The New York Times. LA Confidential (Cover and Feature), “How Fallen Fruit is Changing the Art World & Life in LA.” Their work has been featured in The Idea of the West by Doug Aitken and numerous other publications The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Come Together: The Rise of Cooperative Art and Design by Francesco Spampinato (Princeton Architectural Press) as well as numerous broadcast radio, TV, video and blog venues.
DAVID BURNS BIOGRAPHY:
Born in Los Angeles, California in 1970, David Allen Burns completed an BFA in 1993 from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from UC Irvine in 2005. David grew up in a diverse middle-class community in West Los Angeles and helped out at family owned businesses across Southern California where he would often explore these diverse communities in surrounding neighborhoods on the weekends. From a young age he was regularly meeting new people of all ages and backgrounds and learning about their stories and livelihoods, participating in community events, and attending cultural programs and services. David’s work has always looked at contextualized relational knowledge and disrupting systems of meaning, especially exploring the limitations and boundaries about what could be considered “familiar.” Often work is created with non precious materials, found objects and incorporates materials from the everyday to transform aesthetics and contextual framework that sublimates understanding about what we think we may already know — likened to a conceptual reconstruction of a tromp l’loiel instead of the copy of the visual representation.
AUSTIN YOUNG BIOGRAPHY:
Austin Young (Tranimal, Fallen Fruit) is a multidisciplinary artist whose trademark style interprets a nuanced visual language of beauty, Pop culture, art history, folk art, and transgressive underground exuberance. Whether he’s working in a photography- and video-based modes of performative portraiture, engaging in assertive visibility for Queer culture, or advocating for a community-based resource sharing culture through the literal and metaphoric prism of public fruit trees, Young’s interest is in illustrating the sublime qualities of humanity that moves us all forward.
Originally from Reno, Nevada, studying at Parsons School in Paris, and currently living and working between Los Angeles and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, from an early age, Young has invented novel ways of integrating his diverse interests and eclectic influences into a celebrated image-making career. Young’s practice grew from foundations in celebrity portraiture depicting figures from Margaret Cho to Debbie Harry, Diamanda Galas, Leigh Bowery, Jackie Beat, Alaska Thunderfuck, Siouxsie Sioux, and more in ways that confront personality and identity across gender roles and stereotypical societal constraints, to expansive practices in community engagement, books, performances, and urban agriculture.
Young’s infamous Tranimal Workshop series (with Squeaky Blonde and Fade-Dra) is an experience of radical metamorphosis, transforming willing victims in a gender-bending styling assembly line. Whether creating flamboyant and gleeful transgressive portraiture, or encouraging the proliferation of public access to fruit trees, in a way, all of Austin’s work is about finding beauty and taking pleasure along the margins—and thereby bringing the margins closer to the center.
austinyoung.com and austinyoungforever on instagram
Fulcrum Arts is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Donations to Fallen Fruit are tax deductible to the full extent of the law under Federal ID 95-2540759.
Fallen Fruit is part of Fulcrum Arts Fiscal Sponsorship Program