fallen fruit

Fallen Fruit

Los Angeles, CA

Fallen Fruit, made up of artist duo David Allen Burns and Austin Young, is a collaborative art project that began in Los Angeles with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property. Their work explores participatory art practice, reflecting upon a broader, global environmental movement involving contemporary art and public spaces. Fallen Fruit uses geography and history as indexical tools to create serialized and site-specific works of art that often embrace public participation. The work of Fallen Fruit includes public art projects (Public Fruit Jam, Lemonade Stand, Fallen Fruit Magazine), site specific commissions (Monument to Sharing, Stoneview Nature Center, Theater of The Sun), and museum art installations (NGV Triennial, V&A Museum’s “FOOD: Bigger Than the Plate,” Empire, The Practices of Everyday Life, EatLACMA).

Fallen Fruit has been featured in “What Artists Are doing Now,” Arterritory, Best of LA Arts, LA Weekly, “15 Los Angeles Artists to Watch,” ARTnews (Cover); Artforum (Critic’s Pick); Consumed, New York Times Magazine, among others. Their work has also been featured in such book publications as The Idea of the West by Doug Aitken, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Come Together: The Rise of Cooperative Art and Design by Francesco Spampinato (Princeton Architectural Press) as well as numerous broadcast radio, TV, video and blog venues.

Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration originally conceived in 2004 by David Allen Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Since 2013, David Allen Burns and Austin Young have continued and expanded the collaborative work

From the Journal
Individual Bios

Austin Young is a portrait photographer and video artist based in Los Angeles since 1985.

David Burns

David Burn’s work looks at contextualized relational knowledge and disrupting systems of meaning, especially exploring the limitations and boundaries about what could be considered “familiar.”

Love is Blind by Fallen Fruit.

SUPERSHOW by Fallen Fruit at PDC Design Gallery in Los Angeles, 2019.

Empire by Fallen Fruit.

A Fallen Fruit installation in Victorville, California.

Endless Orchard

Fallen Fruit is a collaborative art project that began in Los Angeles with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property.

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Austin Young is a portrait photographer and video artist based in Los Angeles since 1985.

Artist Bio

David Burns

David Burn’s work looks at contextualized relational knowledge and disrupting systems of meaning, especially exploring the limitations and boundaries about what could be considered “familiar.”

Artist Bio

Fallen Fruit’s Endless Orchard is a non-contiguous map of fruit trees in public space. The orchard exists both in real world and real time. It exists simultaneously at the margins of public and private space, and the boundaries of social media and public participation. A monument to sharing will be anchored by an orchard of orange trees installed at the California State Historic Park and planting of public fruit trees will expand from this location organized by local community groups, schools and the general public. All the public fruit trees in the Endless Orchard will be marked online in a mapping systems similar to Google Maps. This open-source data will integrate with already existing databases into the largest single source map of public fruit trees in the world. The Endless Orchard map will also integrate social media using the fruit trees as markers for public participation.

Discipline
Ecological Art, Public Art
Award Year
2013
Status

Completed

Themes
From the Journal

Fallen Fruit talks about their Creative Capital Project, Endless Orchard, which is anchored at their Monument to Sharing in Los Angeles State Historic Park.

November 9, 2021
Austin Young cropped

Austin Young

Los Angeles, CA

Austin Young is from Reno, Nevada and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. The foundation of his career is from studying at Parsons in Paris. Early in his career, Austin transferred his interests from traditional portrait painting towards a long celebrated career in portrait photography. In many ways, Austin is more accurately described as an image-maker: his projects illustrate the sublime qualities of character that make celebrated people unique. Based on a nuanced visual language of pop-culture iconography, his trademark style and techniques have captured a broad palette of musicians, artists and celebrities including Debbie Harry, Leigh Bowery and Margaret Cho, among others. In multiple bodies of work, Austin confuses personality and identity issues in confrontational and unapologetic image making about people who often split gender roles, stereotypical constraints and socially-constructed identities.
From the Journal
Member of:

Fallen Fruit is a collaborative art project that began in Los Angeles with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property.

Processed with Lensa with Auto Adjustments

David Burns

Los Angeles, CA

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1970, David Allen Burns completed a BFA in 1993 from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from UC Irvine in 2005. David grew up in a diverse middle-class community in West Los Angeles and helped out at family owned businesses across Southern California where he would often explore these diverse communities in surrounding neighborhoods on the weekends. From a young age he was regularly meeting new people of all ages and backgrounds and learning about their stories and livelihoods, participating in community events, and attending cultural programs and services. David’s work has always looked at contextualized relational knowledge and disrupting systems of meaning, especially exploring the limitations and boundaries about what could be considered “familiar.” Often work is created with nonprecious materials, found objects and incorporates materials from the everyday to transform aesthetics and contextual framework that sublimates understanding about what we think we may already know—likened to a conceptual reconstruction of a trompe l’oeil instead of the copy of the visual representation.
From the Journal
Member of:

Fallen Fruit is a collaborative art project that began in Los Angeles with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property.