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
Diane Durant “Mental Pictures”
Diane Durant, “You can’t stay at the Dairy Queen,” she said, blowing on her coffee. [Label] She leans in, but hesitates. Black curls cascade into her warm hazel eyes. Steam wafts, fogs her bifocal lenses as her ancient fingers wrap themselves around a broken ceramic mug, the crack meandering like a fractured lifeline from the handle to the base.
Diane Durant “Because” (label: “My little tomboy” she would say almost apologetically. I understood that to mean that I couldn’t wear camo or short hair like the other boys. )
Diane Durant [Left] For years she tried everything else. [Right] It was hard to stay exciting for a whole lifetime. [Label] Partially settled into depressed ground, an ocean of yellow and brown appears gaseous at first, an oasis of an otherwise invisible desert, before airy masses take the recognizable form of broken down school buses stretching out for miles, discarded like the unwanted carcasses of a once majestic herd.