Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration originally conceived in 2004 by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Since 2013, David Burns and Austin Young have continued the collaborative work.

BIOGRAPHY – DAVID BURNS co-founder and artist, 2004 – present (www.davidburnsprojects.com)

David Burns is a life-long Californian and native of Los Angeles. He earned an MFA in Studio Art from UCIrvine and a BFA from California Institute of the Arts. David is a co-founder of Fallen Fruit, a contemporary art collective that uses fruit as a material for creating art projects that investigate the boundaries of public spaces, including urban geographies, historical archives and bi-located geographies. Prior to his work with Fallen Fruit, David was core faculty in two programs at CalArts from 1994 to 2008. Currently, David is faculty in the graduate program for Fine Art at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. David’s curatorial practice investigates narrative structures in contemporary art with notable exhibitions for the journal Leonardo at MIT; the Armory Center for the Arts and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Concurrent to the development of his career in contemporary art and academics, David has also built expertise in corporate branding strategy, advertising and media as a technical consultant for notable projects with Mercedes Benz, Discovery Channel, SEGA Gameworks and others. David’s work activates the nuances of social spaces, public archives and cultural indexes by creating works of art that are expressions of people and place and reframe conventional concepts of the real-world with shifts of meaning in real-time.

BIOGRAPHY – AUSTIN YOUNG co-founder and artist, 2004 – present   (www.austinyoung.com)

Austin Young is a visual artist from Reno, Nevada and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.  The foundation of his career is from studying at Parsons in Paris. Early in his career, Austin transferred his interests from traditional portrait painting towards a long celebrated career in portrait photography. In many ways, Austin is more accurately described as an image-maker: his projects illustrate the sublime qualities of character that make celebrated people unique.  Based on a nuanced visual language of pop-culture iconography, his trademark style and techniques have captured a broad pallate of musicians, artists and celebrities including Debbie Harry, Leigh Bowery and Margaret Cho, among others.  In multiple bodies of work, Austin confuses personality and identity issues in confrontational and unapologetic image making about people who often split gender roles, stereotypical constraints and socially-constructed identities.  Currently, Austin is self-producing a feature film crowd-sourced musical titled “TBD,” a musical play and film project that is co-created by everyone who participates.  Austin is also a co-founder of Fallen Fruit, a contemporary art collective that uses fruit as a material for projects that investigate the hyper-synergistic qualities of collaboration. Austin Young creates works of art that are transgressive about subjective qualities and emboldens prescribed meaning with an acute focus on honesty and narrative representations of the real.

BIOGRAPHY – MATIAS VIEGENER co-founder and artist  2004 through 2013

Matias Viegener works solo and collaboratively in the fields of writing, visual art, curating, and social practice. He is the author of 2500 Random Things About Me Too, a book of experimental non-fiction hailed as the first book composed on and through Facebook. In 2004 he co-founded Fallen Fruit, a participatory art practice focusing on fruit, urban space and public life; he left the collaboration in 2013. His work has been exhibited at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Ars Electronica, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), The Hammer Museum, ARCO Madrid, Machine Project, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, The Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, and The Drawing Center, as well as in Denmark, Germany, Austria, Colombia and Mexico. With Christine Wertheim, he has edited two anthologies, The Noulipian Analects and Séance in Experimental Writing. He is the editor and co-translator of Georges Batailles’ The Trial of Gilles de Rais. He has fiction in the anthologies The &Now Awards—The Best Innovative Writing, Vital Signs—Essential AIDS Fiction, Encyclopedia F-K, Chronometry, Men on Men 3, Sundays at Seven, Dear World, Abject and Discontents, edited by Dennis Cooper. He has published in Afterimage, American Book Review, Artforum, Art Issues, ArtUS, Artweek, Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Critical Quarterly, Ex Nihilo, Fiction International, Framework, High Performance, The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, The Huffington Post, Mirage, Paragraph, Radical History Review, Semiotext(e), Suspect Thoughts, and X-tra, for whom he writes frequently on visual art. He teaches at CalArts and is the recipient of a 2013 Creative Capital Grant.