Byline: Ramak Fazel

The Wilshire district gallery of Sprüth Magers is physically separated from a certain Southard’s Carwash in Galesburg, Illinois, by 1,969 miles. It is in this Los Angeles gallery directly across the street from the LACMA campus where the latest iteration of Stephen Prina’s “galesburg, illinois+” has enjoyed a three-month run. Back in Illinois nestled between a Rent-A-Center showroom and a barbecue shack, the car wash occupies the site of the former Harbor Lights restaurant. The architectural merits of that long gone building aside, the lore surrounding the beloved Galesburg institution forms the basis of Prina’s ongoing investigation—a demolished restaurant in the artist’s hometown, now the site of a self-service car wash.

Within the gallery space, the presence of the former Art Deco building where Prina once preformed as a musician is repeatedly reinforced through historically accurate reproductions of the period upholstery. In various surface applications, both functional and decorative, this cloth is deployed sometimes as a full wrap of an unexpected surface while other times as surface cladding. The patterned fabric can be observed as a tablecloth but also as border material surrounding a framed photographic print of Carl Sandburg and Marilyn Monroe attributed to the American environmental portraitist, Arnold Newman. Soon, the upholstery comes into focus as yet another stable element within Prina’s concise visual vocabulary. The gestures evident in his artistic practice include his familiar use of black spray paint. The function of the black spray is open to interpretation; here, consider it as a possible formal resolution of historical blind spots, a punctuated proxy spoiling William Pereira’s pristine white cube gallery. Among the various elements within the gallery is an audio system whose rational form seems partly inspired by his seminal piece As He Remembered It. Built of plywood and covered with the Harbor Lights fabric, this audio source most resolutely references his personal experience as a performer within the restaurant. By gingerly pirouetting around his individual memory, Prina manages to align a memory system that activates our collective cultural memory. Within “galesburg, illinois+” his reference points include a poet, a president, German-made picnic tables, and window blinds as color swatches with subtle masonic references added to the mix.

Consider again the distant car wash in Illinois, its presence underscored by the nearly 10×20-foot hanging photographic image of the site as it must appear today. A sort of Google Earth banner attributed to a local Galesburg photographer. Complicating the sanctity of that Galesburg plot on North Henderson Street is its shift from a restaurant for an authentic Italian meal to its utilitarian function as a place to wash a car—all within the span of the artist’s memory.