EUTOPIA

Diane Durant

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Diane Durant "Mental Pictures"

Diane Durant “Mental Pictures”

 

Diane Durant
Mental Pictures
Ft Worth Community Arts Center [link]
Ft. Worth, Texas

Questioning history and truth with more than a sly nod to theorists Derrida, Saussure and Sontag, Durant’s textual images belie easy consumption. Meticulously printed and framed, the photographs challenge the viewer to imagine their own pictures, as well as reconfigure assumptions about the function of an image and caption. Spare and lush, her prose reflects southern childhood experiences of wonder tinged with disappointment–the power of words to inspire and destroy. Yet the work transcends the personal; semiotics be damned, the language is coded with cultural nuances.  Butter Everything, Let It Melt and Because…reverberates as apt metaphors for our current political culture.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

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Zoe Leonard

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Zoe Leonard: Survey
The Whitney, New York [link]
I want a president, 1992
Typewriting on paper

Although this work is the least assuming object in Leonard’s retrospective, it resonates with omnipotent irony to our current political culture. Originally written for QW, an independent queer magazine that folded before publication, Leonard’s letter was an inciteful/insightful call for a voice for the marginalized in the lead up to the Bush/Clinton/Perot election. Twenty-six years later and we still want. And our wants are blatantly ignored. And we are told that our wants are not important. And we still wonder why “always a john and never a hooker, always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.”

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

 

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Chim↑Pom

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photo courtesy of Dallas Contemporary, by Kevin Todora

Chim↑Pom
Non-Burnable
as part of INVISIBLE CITIES: Moving Images from Asia
Dallas Contemporary, Dallas [link]
Sept. 29 – Dec. 17, 2017

The prayers of well-wishing citizens are sent to Hiroshima in the form of thousands of pounds of colorful origami cranes. In a transmutation from cultural meme to sacred rubbish the totems are classified as “non-burnable” trash. This semantic redefinition of folded paper formalizes a social contract wherein sympathetic gestures eclipse the value of environmental or infrastructure concerns, converting social consideration into a societal burden: an ever-expanding archive of care. Maintained by the state, the trash-chive converts morally beneficent acts into sanctioned eco-terrorism, conflating objecthood with fulfillment of a sympathetic ritual.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the Dallas Contemporary, by Kevin Todorra and the author  

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Paper into Sculpture

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Paper into Sculpture
curated by Catherine Craft
The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

The digital has emerged as the primary material for communication, replacing paper. Works featured in this exhibition engage paper’s historical links to systems of knowledge and its material (im)possibilities in intimate and epic works that render the invisible: time, space, and cycles of decay. The sacro-profane nature of paper is conceptualized from maps and scrolls to shredded, torn, and crumpled refuse. Franz West’s Sisyphos IX, 2002 confounds, as paper’s fragility is recast as an enduring mass. In Noriko Ambe’s Inner Water, an intricately cut wave unfurls, like pages, in a glacier-slow persistence of vision. In Marco Maggi’s Global Myopia, an encrypted topography of tiny, cut particulates is a metaphor for more is less in the information age.

~ Sara Cardona
images by Ryder Richards

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Tom Sachs

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Tom Sachs
Tea Ceremony
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

Sachs’ new focus, in coopting and hyperventilating the “religion” of the Japanese tea ceremony, manifests as highly American provisional approximations. Embodying the reductive apparatus of utilitarianism whereby traditional systems or concepts can become lightweight, cheap and nomadic embraces Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality” or Venturi/Brown’s “Learning from Las Vegas” sign-as-system culture. Taken to insane levels of excess, one can track the adept’s passionate re-valuation through selective interpretation: a whisk becomes motorized = shortcut, while only one in one-hundred handmade bowls is acceptable.
This conversion to American systemic foibles dialogizes contradictory knowledge through subjective insight, allowing the possibility for rich, discursive reappraisal.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center

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DPMT7

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DPMT7, Weston Art Gallery (by Tony Walsh)

 

DPMT7
Un Teatro del Nuovo
Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnatti, OH [link]

Elevating the ubiquitous structures of urban construction, the semi-temporary systems of renewal become the allegorical model for a new norm. An opera of the common displaced within the institution inverts and dissolves the typical, reversing context of exterior (mundane) to interior (sacred) and allowing the secular elevation to the epiphanistic.
With an elevated singing platform, 360-degree video montage, and craggy lumber stelae the intent unfolds as a more delicate archeology where one engages ghosts of primal ritualization: a brief poetic, insane glorification of the nomadic, ever-present ignored… the laborious modern religious sacrifice performed for the city.

~ Ryder Richards
photos courtesy of the Weston Art Gallery (by Tony Walsh) and the author

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