Jeffrey Vallance

Overview
Image of Blinky Carcass: Relic and Milagros (Performance Relic)
Jeffrey Vallance, Blinky Carcass: Relic and Milagros (Performance Relic) 2007

For over thirty years, Jeffrey Vallance has turned a critical and humorous eye toward his own wide-ranging experiences. Based on the artist’s memories and adventures, Vallance’s drawings, sculptures, installations and performance-based works make reference to his childhood in California, voyages to the Polynesian Islands and Iceland, residences in Las Vegas and the Arctic, sojourns to the Vatican, and to his celebrated Blinky the Friendly Hen project in 1978, when he held a funeral service for a frozen supermarket hen at Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park. The artist’s examination of these experiences combines a pseudo-anthropological approach with an art historically informed practice, and addresses themes of faith, myth, ritual and popular culture, along with the geopolitical landscapes of the past and present.

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Works
Biography
image of Jeffrey Vallance sculpture, Nixon pin
Jeffrey Vallance, Nixon’s Button, 2008

Born in 1955 in Redondo Beach, California, Vallance currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA from California State University, Northridge in 1979 and an MFA from the former Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles in 1981. A 2004 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow, the artist is currently a visiting assistant professor in New Genres at the University of California in Los Angeles.

 

Among Vallance’s many solo exhibitions since the mid-1970’s, his most notable include The Vallance Bible at Centre d'édition contemporaine in Geneva, Switzerland (2012), The Word of God at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (2011-2012), The Vallance Bible at Centre d'édition contemporaine (2010), Lars Pirak of Lapland, an intervention project at Ájtte Sámi Museum in Jokkmokk, Sweden (2009), Relics and Reliquaries at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, CA (2007), De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal in Middelburg, Holland (2007), Preserving America’s Cultural Heritage at LACMALab, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2006), among others.


His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Barbican Centre in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, TX, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf IN Germany, Tate Gallery in Liverpool, UK, UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Witte de With Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, among others.

Download Artist's CV (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
Exhibitions