JEFFREY VALLANCE
MULTIVALENCE

April 12 – May 19, 2007

Jeffrey Vallance, was born in 1955, in Torrance, California.

He lives and works in Reseda, California. Jeffrey Vallance has always been a researcher of the mythological, the linguistic and the symbolic. He travels around the world looking for personalities and objects which intrigue him. He then elaborates their stories, seeking for linking devices and often creating paranormal connections. His work based upon his findings takes many forms such as: painting, sculpture, video, installation, performance and published texts.

A central aspect to most of his work is the love of confrontation.On the one hand he may profess admiration by chosing religious themes, and on the other his dissection of rituals, relics, and Biblical lore may well be considered as sacrilegious. His work seems as if he is moking blind faith or showing how arbitrary meaning is. A good example is the artist's investigation of shrouds.

One of his early projects involved a frozen chicken named Blinky. In 1978 Vallance purchased a frozen chicken from a supermarket in Saran, named it Blinky and ceremoniously buried it with funeral deserving of a martyr, in a pet cemetery. While awaiting burial, the body of Blinky left a shroud-like stain on a piece of butcher paper, which Vallance named The Shroud of Blinky. Vallance documented this gesture with a video,a book of photographs, and paintings.

Ten years later Vallance recast Blinky in terms of Christ's story of suffering and redemption. Blinky was "resurrected" from the grave. At the end of the video a cartoon caricature of Blinky rises toward heaven, head and body reunited in a glorious moment, "proof" that domestic chickens suffer and die for our flesh-eating sins. For Vallance, Blinky was the only way he could enact all the rituals and emotions of a funeral without having to have a real dead human body.

His work on the Shroud opened up many lines of inquiry: he has exchanged neckties with world leaders, been blessed from the Pope, searched for Bigfoot, discovered the faces of famous clowns in the Shroud of Turin, presented a fish-change purse to the President of of Iceland, and examined the eye of the Virgin of Guadalupe. No matter how diverse the stands of his research, he always manages to blend them together.

Part intrepid explorer and part cultural anthropologist, Vallance has visited numerous foreign countries in an effort to gain authentic experience of their culture. In 1988, he was granted his first audience with the King of Tonga, the largest King in the world, to whom he presented a pair of extra-large swimming flippers. Vallance always performs his “semi-official” diplomatic exchanges with a mix of humor and sincerity, although it is never clear which one is masking which.

Often, the only recording of a performance is a text that Vallance writes upon returning from his journey. These essays are usually an intermingling of objective recording, ancient folklore, religious myths, historical fact, conspiracy theories, and the artist’s own memory and imagination. His works are not presented naively as religious art but as contemporary art-world art and exhibit all the sophistication of a conceptual practice. They look like pranks par excellence but something more serious seems to be going on underneath the immediately recognizable surface.

Special thanks to Cameron Jamie who curated the show together with Jeffrey Vallance.

The gallery remains open from Tuesday to Friday 10:30–20:00,Saturday 12:00–16:00.