Edited by Antonia Marsh
Designed by Robert Milne
Printed by Pureprint, UK
Published by Soft Opening
Edition of 200

Wonderland was published on the occasion of Dean Sameshima’s recent solo exhibition at Soft Opening, London.

The body of work that Sameshima titles Wonderland (1995 – 97) includes four series of images that the artist photographed and exhibited during his time studying under Allan Sekula at CalArts. One group commemoratively documents the exteriors of queer sex clubs and bathhouses at the time, mostly located in Silverlake, Los Angeles, which was home to a considerable LGBTQIA+ community prior to its devastation by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In this exhibition, titled after the series, Sameshima brings together all seven of these images alongside a selection of photographs of specific sites in nearby Griffith Park in Los Angeles and Harbor City Recreational Park in Lomita, which were both notorious cruising areas. Wonderland marks the first time a substantial group of these works has been shown together since the early 2000s.