Tim Sullivan Reflection

 It was interesting to hear from Tim Sullivan on his experimental art, his career, and his uncanny resemblance to the pop star Heino. One of my favorite ideas of his was the still life ‘negatives’. The artist would attempt to paint the objects in the scene their opposite/negative color, so that after inverting them the colors would stay the same while shadows turned white and highlights turned black. Overall, Sullivan’s experimental practice greatly appealed to me. He seemed to dabble in almost every medium to suit his needs as an artist.

Sullivan’s work based on California also appealed to me, in the way it coexisted with Barthesian ideas of the work and the text. The images on the billboards (images of idealized ‘California’ that often depicted entirely different locales) recalled the viewers perceptions of the textual idealization of the state, while simultaneously subverting them (the holes cut out of the billboards add a tinge of doubt to the ideas). The cut out circles from the billboards being displayed in the gallery below adds an entire other meaning to them. Placed within the ‘white cube’ of the art gallery, how are these idealized images interpreted as compared to their billboard counterparts?


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