Dave Muller: Stars & Bars (American)

PRESS RELEASE

Dave Muller: Stars and Bars (American)

14 January – 18 February 2005

Opening reception: Friday, 14 January, 6 to 8 pm

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artist Dave Muller. A native of the Bay Area, this is Muller’s first show at the gallery. An avid chronicler of pop culture and a lifelong appreciator of music, Muller’s work raises interesting questions of identification, ownership, evolution and portraiture.

Muller bought his first record, The Royal Guardsmen Snoopy v. The Red Baron, at a garage sale when he was eight. Thinking it was a Beatles album, Muller also purchased a Beau Brummels record at the same sale. He began playing the trumpet at nine years old and has been the bassist and trumpet player in the reunited Destroy All Monsters (an anti-rock band begun in the early 1970’s by Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Carey Loren and Carey’s then-girlfriend Niagra) for the past decade. 

Muller exploits his music fixation to make this exhibition. The show features drawings of albums selected from Muller’s own record collection, a group currently numbering almost 3,500. The records are depicted about eight times larger than their actual size, which happens to be as high as Muller can reach with his feet on the ground. A bit frayed around the edges, the albums mirror human experience, displaying the bumps and bruises of life.

A series of eight album drawings cryptically relate to the Sound of Music. Two compilation album drawings are also included, as well as five drawings referred to as stars; arrangements of groupings of musical categories as found in magazines, books, newspapers and websites.  A radio transmitter configured to Muller’s iPod reveals an interesting self-portrait-as-a-radio-station, broadcasting all the music he’s listened to since the New Year, 12:01am, 1 January 2005.

Muller has become prominent making work that promotes friends and fellow artists. Well known as the founder/curator of Three Day Weekend events – brief kamikaze-style art exhibitions staged in unconventional spaces – as well as for his watercolor drawings that functioned as other artist’s show announcements, these music related works conversely offer a view of Muller himself.

Currently in a group exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Muller was also recently included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and featured in a two-person exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.