Conceptual artist Thomas Demand discusses how an encounter with a picture on a celebrity gossip website instigated his latest work in today’s film from White Zinfandel magazine, which will celebrate the release of its “Food Fights”-themed issue during this week's NADA Miami Beach fair. Based between Los Angeles and Berlin, Demand is known for building life-sized, three-dimensional paper and cardboard models of spaces, inspired by found images, that he then photographs himself and almost always ultimately destroys. This singular technique is behind his recent “Junior Suite,” a work for which the Munich-born sculptor and photographer recreated Whitney Houston’s insalubrious half-eaten “last meal” in her Beverly Hilton Hotel room as it appeared in an image published on TMZ. The film by Friend & Colleague, a studio founded by Alexei Tylevich with his sister Katya, sees Demand reveal how he visited the hotel and ordered the same food in an attempt to achieve a kind of accuracy within the murky world of trivia and generalization. Since his rise to prominence in the mid-1990s, the artist's innovative work has earned him a mid-career retrospective at MoMA in 2005, as well as major solo shows at London's Serpentine Gallery and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and past inspirations for his scale copies include a soldier’s snapshot of the kitchen Saddam Hussein used before his capture and the studio of an artist targeted by the Baader-Meinhof gang. “An underlying assumption in my work is that one way we come to understand who we are is through the images that we collect and remember,” he says. Seen through Demand's oeuvre, images as we remember them, much like those intended to sell the most newspapers or get the most clicks online, are in many ways fictional.
Thomas Demand is among 30 contributors to the latest issue of White Zinfandel, which will host "De Nada", an amuse-bouche culinary collaboration taking place at Miami's Hotel Deauville this Thursday December 6, 2012.