A survey of Los Angeles based artist Jason Yates’ influential series Fast Friends, Inc. will be exhibited in New York City for the first time from November 22nd through December 20th. This body of work synthesizes pop-cultural histories in the form of highly obsessive, large format xerographed and hand colored drawings covered in novelty stickers, googly eyes, reflective mylar, yarn, and glitter. These extremely labored, one-of-a-kind posters were exhibited, free for the taking, in public spaces around Hollywood and proliferated on internet social networks such as MySpace, often promoting gigs for like minded bands such as Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Black Dice, and Animal Collective.

Fast Friends, Inc. is cultural hi-jacking; a representation of fear, the failure of the collective, the fetishism of the collapse, the language of mania, anger, regression, absurdity, redundancy, misinterpretation, formal cannibalization, and the theatre of excess and dysfunction. The artist explains, “My studio practice relative to this project is prone to slumming or manic recuperation. I cultivate petty drama and my studio output navigates a line between underachievement and the skyward fingertips of an asshole who consistently assumes to know “the answer”. The Fast Friends Inc. project is a prolonged contradiction that weaves the conventions of the rock poster with irreverent and irrational methods of production which enables a formal identity crisis. My loose interpretation of the conventional poster format and erratic production value encourages the individual works intended language of obscurity, impermanence, and inconsistency. Please excuse the mess.”

Jason Yates was born and raised in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan in 1972. He began exhibiting his art in 1991 and, in 1992, collaborated with George Clinton (Parliament/ Funkadelic) on a series of drawings and paintings. He attended The University of Michigan’s School of Fine Arts and received his BFA in 1995. He then moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and attended Art Center’s Master of Fine Arts Program, receiving his MFA in 2000. Yates studied with artists Mike Kelley, Mayo Thompson, Larry Johnson, Liz Larner, and Bruce Hainley.