Austin Young

Artist, Filmmaker, Photographer

FALLEN FRUIT BIOGRAPHY Fallen Fruit is a long-term art collaboration that began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects and site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world. By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works reimagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. Public Fruit Jams invites a broad public to transform homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making as experimentation in personal narrative and sublime collaboration; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours explores the boundaries of public and private space at the edge of darkness; Public Fruit Meditations renegotiates our relationship of ourselves through guided visualizations and dynamic group participation. Fallen Fruit’s visual work includes an ongoing series of narrative photographs, wallpapers, everyday objects and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. Recent curatorial projects reindex the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing permanent collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject. David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young are the three artists of Fallen Fruit that imagine fruit as a lens through which to see the world. Austin Young bio: Austin Young is a portrait photographer and video artist based in LA since 1985, He’s created an encyclopedic documentation of sub and trans culture in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. His work has expanded to include performative collaborations with the public. He is co-founder of the art collectives Fallen Fruit and TRANIMAL. In ‘TRANIMAL Workshop,’ gallery attendees go through a conveyor belt of artists to be transformed into genderless expressions of the subconscious. In his recent solo show, YOUR FACE HERE, the public became the subjects, via portraiture, of his show. Young’s work has been featured in Vogue, 7Hollywood,Flaunt and Interview Magazine, and shown at LACMA, Matadero Madrid, Ars Electronica, WOW Storefront Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum, the Hammer and Stephen Cohen. He recently broke attendance records at LACMA with his collaborators Fallen Fruit and received praise for Tranimal 2010 at the Hammer Museum as “One of 2010’s Top Ten fashion trends in LA†– Lina Lecaro, LA Weekly.

Fruit Trees. Visual Arts. Public Art. Socially Engaging Art. Photography. Video.

Plant fruit trees on the margins of public space in cities and neighborhoods so that you can share your fruit with strangers and passersby.

I love doing portraits. I love making comedy videos.