Sean Landers: 1990-1995, Improbable History

Through media as various as paintings, diaristic calendars and performative videos, New York-based artist Sean Landers (born 1962) articulates his personal self-doubts and humiliations, attempting a sincere and unflinching excavation of the artist’s consciousness. Landers foregrounds the artist’s personality as an object worthy of study, and in his relentless articulation of emotion, at its most base and its most noble–from self-loathing to empathy and love–he reconceives and renews this persona. This volume, and the exhibition it accompanies at the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, takes the years between 1990 and 1995 as Landers’ formative and decisive period, and examines the conceits that he has cultivated over the course of his 20-year career, from the early yellow legal pads featuring the fictional artist Chris Hamson as autobiographer to the reclaiming of the persona by Landers’ own voice.