Ask the Dust: Jedediah Caesar, Case Calkins, Patrick Hill
September 6 – October 1
Opening reception September 8


D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present Ask The Dust, an exhibition of new sculpture by three emerging Los Angeles artists: Jedediah Caesar, Case Calkins, and Patrick Hill. The title of the show is taken from John Fante's 1939 novel Ask the Dust, which tells the story of a struggling writer who’s life is shaped by both the social and physical environments of depression era Los Angeles. Each artist combines a variety of materials and methods within their individual works creating multifaceted objects that reflect both the geographical and psychological backdrops to their practice –Los Angeles and the surrounding desert.

Jedediah Caesar will show an artificial geode made from cast resin objects found in his kitchen --a faux geological object whose built up layers suggest an organic passage of time. Case Calkins will exhibit totemic sculptures of tinted plaster in which negative space has been carved out to create forms reminiscent of desert rock. Patrick Hill’s delicately balanced assemblages, constructed from a combination of materials such as wood, glass and hand-dyed fabric, suggest metaphysical narratives through their formal characteristics.

A text by Los Angeles based writer, Michael Ned Holte, will accompany the exhibition. Acknowledging the hallucinatory tone of Robert Smithson's "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," J.G. Ballard's "The Voices of Time," and other textual sources, Holte constructs a post-historical fiction around a fragment from Fante's Ask the Dust. Placing the work of Caesar, Calkins, and Hill in the wasteland of Bakersfield after the destruction of Los Angeles, the text suggests the gradual disintegration of language in the face of these sculptures and proposes a complex relationship between the material, syntax, and temporality of sculpture and language.

Jedediah Caesar (MFA, University of California, Los Angeles, 2001) has recently had a solo exhibition at Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles and his work was included in “Thing” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Case Calkins (MFA, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, 2004) has recently shown at Art2101, Los Angeles and at Playspace Gallery, San Francisco. Patrick Hill (MFA, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, 2000) has had recent solo exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, and boom gallery, Chicago. He has exhibited work at The Approach, London and John Connelly Presents, New York.