Members of SASSAS and invited guests will be peforming at the Eagle Rock Music Festival OCT. 4//9:00 - 10:30pm//Church of Christ//5080 Maywood.

Pulled from the archives! Listen to this mp3 (37 Mb!) recording of a 41 minute, live on-air performance we did on Mitch Brown's KXLU radio show back in 1999.

I have a new sound piece posted to the CalArts Viral.net "Lament Project."

Listen to my one minute sound piece, "Untitled."

"Untitled" was performed using a Flower Electronics Little Boy Blue analog synth and its evil little sister, the BPNG.

Artist and writer Diana Jou posted a nice feature about my work "Datum" (pictured) on her Pushback.org blog. Diana was the 2007 Humanity In Action American Fellow, author and editor for Jaded magazine, and a great photographer in her own right. Thanks, Diana!

I have two record photographs in the Summer Guest Show at Acuna-Hansen Gallery in Chinatown. The show runs from June 28-July 26.
























My photographs of select album covers act as an archive of historic, aesthetic disruptions in the landscape of conservative culture and military-industrial complex in Southern California. By using specific records, I am appropriating words and images in order to create a reflexive language of protest. These photographs form a typology of adoration, nostalgia, aesthetics, and word-play poesies. Originating during a very abstract time of war in the early to mid 80s, these records evoke memories of an era not too dissimilar to the current war in Iraq.



My photograph of Whites Point in San Pedro is also featured in a photo exhibition at The Muckenthaler Cultural Center, which runs from July 13-Sept. 28.

Gabie Strong
Datum, 2008 (installation view)
16 Light Jet photographs, 14.5 x 18" ea.


The project My War (after the 1983 Black Flag record of the same name) is an attempt to reveal the uncanny structure of the naturalization of war in Southern California. By photographing archives, landscapes of military ruins, and in turn poetic, activist, and radical responses to this latent militarism in the Los Angeles region, this work forms a geographic and indexical trace of imperialism rooted in the banality of the everyday.

The central focus within My War is the conceptual photographic piece Datum, a series of sixteen photographs of bound periodicals located in the UC Irvine, Langson Public Library. These photographs literally depict colorful, burlap bound journals and magazines of US defense industry data reports, counterintelligence statistical manuals, military oversight committee white papers, outsider watchdog group pamphlets, and armed forces handbooks. The sequence of dates represented in Datum span from the early 70s to the present, signifying a time line of war during eras of supposed peace and conflict. Presented in a linear sequence organized by form, color, and a poetic play with language, these books render a surprising sequential narrative of war throughout the artist's lifetime.

The explicit titles of the books coupled with sequential time signatures suggest that a larger system is in effect, vis-a-vis Paul Virilio's theory of "Pure War"--the continuous and systematic act of war, not only engaging in actual violence but also through organized logistical efforts to control economies, architecture, cities, and the technology we use in our everyday lives.


Installation views of the project -













Left to right:

After Watergate, Vietnam, and the abandonment of other principles (Christopher John Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee, Palos Verdes, CA 1974-1977), 2008
6 color photographs, 8 x 12" ea.

Battery (BCN-127, 1942, San Pedro, CA), 2008
Light Jet photograph, 48x 60" ea.

What Makes a Man Start Fires? (Minutemen, 1982, San Pedro CA)
Politics of Time (Minutemen, 1984, San Pedro CA)
The Punchline (Minutemen, 1981, San Pedro CA)
2008
3 Light Jet photographs, 30x 30" ea.

UCI Studio Art MFA Exhibition at LAXART
June 28 - July 10

David Patton Los Angeles
July 7-August 4 2007

5006 1/2 York Blvd.
Highland Park
Los Angeles, California 90042

Jeremy Yoder, Ill Caller, 2006
In this group show curated by Gabie Strong, the artists selected will be using the gallery David Patton Los Angeles, located at 5006 1/2 York Blvd., as a starship for explorations of time and space. Some might consider the word "landscape" as a proper painterly term to describe some of the work presented in this show, as an analogy for the curious rub between past, present, and future; others will just say, far out!

Artists in the exhibition have invented myths of the near future, depicted the collapse of human time within the force of geologic time, and resurrected histories past. Come pause for speculation whilst viewing collage, painting, drawing, and sculpture! Listen to real-time sound performance, as temporal investigations of virtual lands through systems interference! Enter the worm hole to explore futures near and far!

Download the curatorial essay or look at the checklist of images from the exhibition


Featuring work by

Andy Alexander
Kent Familton
Wendy Heldmann
Kathleen Johnson
Alice Koenitz
Tracy Nakayama
Gina Osterloh
Sean Sullivan
Kristine Thompson
Jeremy Yoder

Two special nights of sound performance

The opening reception with 07/07/07 with Sharon Cheslow and Steven Kim

August 4th with yek koo (Helga Fassonaki), and Tom Watson (Slovenly, Overpass, Red Krayola, New Energy) with artist Kent Familton


Images from the performances


Steve Kim and Sharon Cheslow


Tom Watson and Kent Familton


Helga Fassonaki


Thank you to Jason Heath and The Escarpment for supplying all our PA needs!

See a short Quicktime Movie of Helga's performance

STS:116, 2007 C-print mounted to acrylic, 20x24"


Bacon, eggs, sausage, a biscuit (breakfast with an astronaut), 2007
C-print mounted to acrylic, 20x24"


Fossil of the Future, 2007 C-print mounted to acrylic, 20x24"


Flesh & Geometry, 2007 C-print mounted to acrylic, 20x24"


Space Rituals, 2007 C-print mounted to acrylic, 20x24"

Spaceship Earth, 2007 C-print 14x11"

White I, 2007, 20x20" C-print


White II, 2007, 20x20" C-print


White III, 2007, 20x20" C-print

This series of images is of the US Army Golden Knights Parachutists skydiving in formation. This is the Army's version of entertainment in a post 9/11 world.

From the Golden Knights website, "The Golden Knights not only perform at air shows, compete on an international level and perform high profile tandems they also visit high schools and work with local recruiters showing young adults what type of opportunities the Army has for them."

angels gate 8.16.98 dusk: artists + trios pulled from a hat, organized by Cindy Bernard

Featuring Joseph Hammer, Michael Intriere, Lynn Johnston, Joe Potts, Marina Rosenfeld,Jim Shaw, Francis Stark, Gabie Strong, Paul Tzanetopoulos, Kira Vollman, Tom Watson and Mike Watt

August 16, 1998

Video documentation of space, climate, light, mood, a one evening only performance at the Schindler House, in collaboration with visual artist Cindy Bernard as part of her solo exhibition entitlted, Location Proposal #2.

Live improvisational music by Gabie Strong, David Patton and Ron Russell, with live remixing by Joe Potts and Joseph Hammer.

February 16, 2000

Cindy Bernard and the wonderful folks at SASSAS have generously posted up recordings of some of the sound. series of which I participated. You can listen to the session Ron, David and I made as PSR, and you can also listen to the Angels Gate artists + trios sesh with myself, Joe Potts and Francis Stark.

Rod Poole
David Patton, Gabie Strong, Ron Russell (guitars)
September 26, 1999
(click on the link above and scroll down to the concert listing)

angels gate 8.16.98 dusk: artists + trios pulled from a hat
August 16, 1998
Trio One: Joe Potts (chopped optigan), Francis Stark (guitar), Gabie Strong (drums)


Thanks, Cindy and SASSAS!

Body/City, 2005 Silver gelatin print 14x11"


Body/City, 2005 Silver gelatin print 14x11"


Body/City, 2005 Silver gelatin print 14x11"


Body/City, 2005 Silver gelatin print 14x11"

In attempt to qualify the everyday stuff around us, we have become dependent upon the photographic image to represent our technological and cultural achievements. This suggests that collectively we acquiesce to the role of the operator and subjugate landscape to that of object. We have become accustomed to violating landscape through the framing of the camera. Simultaneously, we exploit landscape through architecture and war, by means required for land-use, site work, and geographic domination. This development is malignant, rendered as a slow moving violation, anesthetized to the point of banality. Landscape is living simulacrum, materialized by Architecture into latent form. The problem is, however, that we tend not to see it. We need a new device for landscape projection.

My intent has been to exploit the violation of landscape made available through the gaze of the camera’s eye and executed through architecture.

To understand the violation of visuality, one must examine not only Barthes’ logic of the camera Operator, the Subject being photographed and the Spectacle of the photograph, but also how the material and technological components of the camera enable this violation.

The materiality of glass in the camera lens allows for focusing of the subject, rendering it as object. It also acts as a physical barrier in architecture – say a store front window – to separate space but simultaneously allow for visual connections.

The lens refracts the light energy projected from the subject as an apparition on the film within the camera body. The image formed is a simulacrum; a fake, a representation of the subject being photographed. When light passes through the camera body and exposes the silver of film, a representation is made visible.

Mirrored glass on skyscrapers acts very similarly within the context of landscape. In this situation, the mirrored skin of the skyscraper reflects the sky and other buildings. This suggests that the building itself produces copies of other buildings like a spectrum of landscape eidolon.

If, as I believe, architecture is the physically violent component of the camera’s violation of landscape, then is it possible to translate this formation of the simulacrum into intervention through the materiality of the camera apparatus? If so, what kind of experience is created through this exploitation? By exploring materials inherent to the photographic process, the intervention becomes clear through the use of film. By using architectural techniques of site work and analysis, and through exchanging “study models” for “models,” I staged a series of simulacrum in landscape.

These experiments, designed to give off affect from catoptric devices, form abstracted images of the environment, mixing the virtual and reality of everyday life.

Film allows for the reflection and refraction of light energy like an architectural prism, rendering new landscape.

By combining theories and practices together, I have created a series of cinematic interventions in concrete islands. These images are used as tools for mapping the real and virtual landscapes pictured within the latent image. The mappings suggest an unknown landscape sitting within our collective reality; a multitude of other spaces exist without us seeing them directly. Through this process I am staging an occupation in landscape.

My use of the term virtual landscape suggests a cognitively recognizable place that escapes our conventions of time, space and site. I am suggesting that the transformation of subject to object in the spectrum does not just simply end at the formation of the latent image. The transformation continues in the virtual space mapped through the materials shared by architecture and photography. The virtual space is the space of transgression; it is the undefined, vague and ambivalent landscape we cannot fully see nor thus control. The hallucinogenic landscape subjects us to madness.

A wonderland seen through the looking glass…

- G. Strong, January 2006

Architectural prisms set at human scale. Set in the landscape as a field condition, users can interact with the prisms like a voyeur in cinema.

Click on the images to expand the view.

Car Club is an installation consisting of single channel video with synchronized slide show, mirror ball, colored lights, and drawings. The video projection and paper drawings are collaged works describing the architectural spaces of the Women's club including the garage, lounge, Ruscha pools, and gardens. The narration consists of the different voices of the women's club, situated in Elysian Valley, each voice describing the activities taking place within the club.


Installation view (light projections)


Car Club (still 1)


Car Club (still 2)


Car Club (still 3)


Car Club (still 4)


Car Club Installation view (drawings)

Architecture proposal for Owens Valley: Motel, Restaurant, Truck Stop, Saloon. Along highway 395 through Owens Valley, the tourist runs smack into Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors. From the Perry Kulper "Surrealism Studio," SCI-Arc, Spring 05.



Truck Stop detail (Jake's Chocolate Grinder)


Motel detail, 1'= 1/16"



Motel detail


Motel detail


Motel detail