About the Exhibition.

TMR is pleased to collaborate with Colección Isabel y Agustin Coppel (CIAC) to present David Hammons’ Phat Free—one of his only videos to date—for a limited two-week run.  A recording of a 1995 public performance that was then edited and exhibited at the 1997 Whitney Biennial, this will be the first time that the work has been publicly screened in Los Angeles.

At the beginning of the video there is nothing to see, only noises in the darkness, heard in the moments before images.  When the visuals start, we see a figure, filmed in a blur of low-light slow motion, kicking a metal can through the nighttime streets of New York City. As he moves down the street, the kicking takes on a pattern; from noise to a kind of music. And then the video loops and we go back into the dark. But the noises have changed. No longer such a mystery, they now testify to the presence of a person and a place. No longer noise, they are now signals in the dark, reminding us of what just was, and presaging what will soon be again.

David Hammons: Phat Free is presented in concurrence to the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in nearly 45 years, staged just up the road in the city’s Arts District. To travel the space between, up-or-down the historic and storied Alameda Corridor, is to see the neighborhood be transformed, from a space where people lived on and made their living off of the streets, to one where moneyed consumption and astronomical rents are the norm. Phat Free is a poetic rejoinder to this process, emphasizing a cyclical meander of meaning over progress and accumulation, and reminding us of a human creativity that does not need high production values or institutional validation.