Cirrus is pleased to present What Do You Want to Come Back As? and In Your Dreams, two groups of graphic works by California artists Thaddeus Strode and Chris Wilder. Published by Cirrus in 1991 and 1992, both Strode and Wilder draw from the worlds of comic books and science fiction in their practices.
An example of Wilder’s art depicts a tranquil, 1950s-era photo of a Monte Carlo beach scene – adorned with mysterious, barely perceivable red dots hovering above the crowd – and juxtaposes this rather strange tableaux with a comic book illustration of a pile of jewels – its caption, Made in Hong Kong, heightens the surreal quality of it all.
Chris Wilder has shown at Happy Lion (Los Angeles), Linda Cathcart Gallery (Santa Monica), Kim Light (Los Angeles), Blum & Poe (Culver City), Kapinos Galerie (Berlin), Tanja Grunert (Cologne) Roger Merians Gallery (New York), Linda Cathcart (Santa Monica), and Cirrus (Los Angeles).
One of Thaddeus Strode’s works pairs text and fictional maps of faraway fantasy lands printed onto a child’s bed linens, which in turn are formed into a Buddha-like vertical wall hanging. He has also combined the statement, What If This Were You, with an image of a BMW car, printed in ghostly white against a black background: real and incarnate together, suggesting that viewers might think of themselves as automobiles.
In addition to Cirrus, he has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Neugerriemschneider (Berlin), Happy Lion (Los Angeles), The Agency (London), TBA Exhibition Space (Chicago), Galerie Michael Janssen (Cologne), Gallerie Nicolai Wallner (Copenhagen), Gio Marconi (Milan), and Galerie Krinzinger (Vienna).
Thad and Chris, both graduates of Cal Arts in the mid-1980s, live and work in Los Angeles.