Dean Sameshima
Gifted to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2022
Seven photographs from the series Wonderland, 1995–97
Set of 7 C-prints
23 x 31 inches each (framed)
Edition of 3 + 2AP (AP1)
Dean Sameshima’s Wonderland series from 1995–97 is comprised of a suite of seven photographs that capture the exteriors of bathhouses and sex clubs in Los Angeles. Sameshima photographed them during the day, unpopulated and virtually undetectable as sites of anything as potent and compelling as the nighttime activities that they hosted. As writer and curator Andy Campbell writes in the catalogue for his 2016 survey of Sameshima’s work titled “Public Sex:”
In the mid-1990s Sameshima began photographing the cruising grounds that he covered as a teenager and a young man in and around Los Angeles…These photographs of places without people lay out one of the core concerns of Sameshima’s artistic career: the politics of identification as evidenced through the tension between surveillance and concealment – especially concerning sex in public and semi-public spaces.”
In the same essay, Sameshima reflected on this series:
I don’t think I ever thought much about sadness as a theme or something that propelled me…maybe more fear than sadness. Maybe they are linked? Like the sex clubs. I photographed them while they were still opened for business, they just happened to close down a few years after my series was complete, but I feared this might happen and what would happen once they closed? What safe place would we have then? Back to the streets? The parks? Tea rooms? All these potentially violent spaces. So the fear of losing something (I found lots of value in), was perhaps a strong emotion for me. I am not a naturally optimistic person at all.
