RANDALL MESDON

PHOTOGRAPHER / DIRECTOR

Randall Mesdon

“Sex, beach, and mountains.” For the perennially cool French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, they are the three pillars upon which the myth of the American West rests. Writing in his 1988 cult classic book America, Baudrillard riffed upon a California landscape that he saw as equally rarefied and savage, an alternate reality (and yet the reality of popular culture) sealed off from the rest of the world, an Eden of arid deserts, lush Bel Air gardens, and monumental backlots in Burbank.

 

In one way or another, the legend of California, a conflation of geographic grandeur with the heady promise of self-invention, has long cast its spell upon visual artists. Raymond Pettibone, James Turrell, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari — the list goes on. Divining in the cultural monumentality of Los Angeles a brutal and intoxicating truth, each of them encountering the archetype of the Wild West somewhere between the Sunset Strip and Venice Beach.

 

For Randall Mesdon, it is that very quality of California, where aspiration and geography connect, that informs his own work as a visual artist and photographer. “California,” he notes, “is a dreamer’s paradise,” bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the west and vast deserts to the east. As Mesdon is himself quick to point out, “the Pacific Ocean is a complete magnet to me.” It makes sense then that Mesdon’s work channels the iconography and symbolism of the surfer, that daydreaming, wave-chasing oracle of California’s spiritual apex.

 

Among his body of work, Mesdon is known for transforming found surfboards — often damaged and bearing the marks of use — into sculptural ready-mades à la Marcel Duchamp. Indeed, for Mesdon, signs of wear and tear inheres in the used surfboards he works with a totemic quality. Every scratch or ding, Mesdon points out, “is a storyline for me.”

 

Mesdon’s own California story began in 1987. After a road trip driving across the arid Mojave Desert, he was deposited in Venice Beach. “I realized it was pretty wild,” he notes of his first impressions of the neighborhood. “This was all before the gentrification that you see,” he adds, “a time when gangs and violence dominated the area.” But amidst the grittiness and blight, Mesdon also encountered the West Coast punk scene which had already entrenched itself there, a landscape deeply stepped in the anarchic music of Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag and The Adolescents and documented in the irreverent, illustrative art of Dog Town’s artists-in-residence, Raymond Pettibon.

 

For Mesdon, exposure to the Punk scene, Pettibon’s art, and the DIY, mono-chromatic aesthetic of Xeroxed show flyers would come to influence his own aesthetic process and approach to materials used in his creative process. “I think the reason that my work is in black and white,” Mesdon notes, “can be traced to my interest in Black Flag, Sonic Youth, and Pettibon’s art from the time.” But, whereas Pettibon’s use of black and white imagery could be viewed as an attempt to subvert the iconography of the comic book genre, Mesdon’s interest in a monochromatic palette is rooted in his desire to simplify, to distill the ethos of Californian culture into its purest, most translucent form.

 

It’s an aesthetic simplicity that Mesdon contends is tied to his appreciation for the “Finish Fetish” look associated with artists of the Southern California-based Light and Space movement, Larry Bell, John McCracken, and Robert Irwin, among them. “I’m looking to tell a story,” Mesdon notes, comparing his process to storytelling, “in as few lines as possible.”

 

Mesdon’s own story, first as an outsider to the California surf punk scene, and later as a commentator upon it, reached its apotheosis when his work was included in the highly influential 2010 multi-gallery group show “Swell,” curated by Tim Nye and Jacqueline Miro. Staged at three New York City-based galleries (nyehaus, Metro Pictures, and Friedrich Petzel Gallery) the exhibition included works by many of the artists Mesdon himself had been influenced by — Pettibon, McCracken, and Bell. “It was a dream, an honor for me to see my work included alongside artists I had found so influential to me.”

 

When pressed to reflect upon the longstanding influence California has had upon his own work, Mesdon, like his fellow Frenchman Baudrillard, takes on a philosophical tone. “California, for me,” Mesdon notes, “is at once cosmic and meditative, a gritty utopia where the fantasy of the American dream meets the harsh reality of nature untamed.”

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RANDALL MESDON