Dawn DeDeaux: Now. And Then. NOAR pre-publication

 https://www.noareview.org/uploads/4/3/5/8/43585085/kathy_rodriguez_-_dawn_dedeaux_retrospective_-_noma.pdf

 

          

         

         “The Space Between Worlds” is local artist Dawn DeDeaux’s long awaited, much anticipated retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art.  Walking into the grand hall, one is greeted by a pantheon of fragmented digitally-rendered figures archivally printed on paper and mounted to metal, from “The Vanquished Series” (2016-2017).  They illusionistically project into three dimensions, with hologram-like effects as the viewer moves left to right, back and forth in front of them.  At life size or larger, they loom over the viewer; even without specific gazes through the blank helmets that blur into the background, one feels watched.  It is this sensation of other-worldly voyeurism that permeates the exhibition, as though the future – or even the present – is taking careful account of earthly actions now.

            One of the most curious of these images is Swirling Into Vortex, an image I revisited several times in the two times I went to NOMA for this show.  While the figure is apparent in its reflective, monochromatically bronzed, slightly crouching stance, a whirlwind of hurricane-like fragments obfuscates specific details.  Circular iconography reminiscent of odd patterns found on the ocean floor – now known to be mating nests of white-spotted pufferfish – are “embossed” into the image.  The idea of mating calls and potential procreation are tantalizing, as theories abound that homo sapiens evolved in part due to copulation with alien species.

            Speakers project the voice of Anne Sullivan reading a variety of poems over the fragmented figures.  Walking through the space, Sullivan’s voice is also fragmented, and bits of the poetry emerge and fall back as the images entrance the eye. The audio work, titled Souvenirs of Earth: Because I Could Not Stop for Death (2014-2021), includes recitations of poems by Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, and John Milton. Each of the selected poems takes on at least somewhat apocalyptic themes, as well as loneliness, isolation, and contemplation, like an Edward Hopper painting. 

            The ancient and present quality of the figures in the digital drawings is fully realized in Between Time: Reunion, a hollow aluminum and copper sculpture cast this year (2021). The work is situated where the bronze Rodin figure would normally pose. By its size and mass, it works like an excavated sarcophagus, the mummified remains now vacant from the interior.  I felt compelled after close inspection to visit the Linda Benglis sculpture hidden away on the second floor, as the metal drips and curds of DeDeaux’s sculpture reminded me of the same effects in Benglis’ aluminum pour.  I could not help but marry the two – both oddly figurative in a way, Benglis’ like a lava pour, DeDeaux’s like an ancient burial form – in my mind. Again, the visage of time recorded in DeDeaux’s large-scale unearthed “artifact” seemed to mark my moves.

            DeDeaux captures the idea of Earth emerging from a fiery primordial ooze in a video titled Where’s Mary (2021). This captivating digital projection from four separate projectors keeps the viewer in the room.  It’s difficult to maintain an audience’s attention in front of digital work, but the richness of the imagery and the imagination DeDeaux encourages in creating the narrative are too tantalizing to leave the darkened space and IMAX- sized video. It begins with explosions of gray dust that segue into hot volcanic imagery and flames, an apt representation of the Big Bang. 

This imagery gently moves into twirling captures of a crystalized Virgin Mary statue that sits atop a pedestal to the far right of the room.  She appears to look up and slowly bow her head as the camera records her soft spinning, as though this religious figure cannot bear to think about a collective fate.  She watches and then rejects.  The metaphor of the Virgin knowing the final fate of her son, Jesus, is a deeply resonant one for the population of Catholics in New Orleans, and for the current trends of decimation of the planet. Asteroids twirling in space to a staccato, abstract soundtrack then move back to images of the Virgin, who again turns her face and her crystallized eyes from the future.

The digital projection serves as a centerpiece of the design of the exhibition.  It’s flanked on either side by arrangements of installation and sculpture that speak of lost space and time. Walking in from the left entrance, the viewer is presented with an array of objects and images situated much like a natural history museum’s curation. Dirt Bowl Table (2021) is to the far right. Several dozen hand-turned wooden bowls filled with donations of soil, sand, and cremated ashes from people around the world rest on an underlit acrylic case. In this context, these samples act like relics – especially with the inclusion of ashes – and the display case serves as their unlikely reliquary.

Past two drill bits titled “Dinosaurs” (2007) and another, vertical lightbox illuminating a digital drawing titled Tools Departing Definition (2020), the giant ring that rose above a small lot of debris and earthly artifacts during Prospect 3 as part of Mothership III: The Station punctures a partial wall and leans over the viewer.  I wrote about the former installation for this journal and likened it to a cervix literally pregnant with potential.  Now it is positioned in interior space against a series of digital prints repetitively depicting it against a background of trees and sky. Ladders to that sky and a grayed, Captain America target-shield accompany the works.  Appearing in this context as a giant maw, the ring looks to swallow us whole while simultaneously acting as a primary structure for a craft to take humanity away from the desolated ruin it created.

Humanity’s destructive force is symbolized in a sculpture of a wrecking ball hung from the ceiling with a heavy nautical chain, a leaning and scrappy rattan chair, and two collapsing columns, one of which suspended from delicate filament.  The toppling of magnificent civilizations is a common theme in the visual arts, particularly within themes of Baroque power and Romantic cautionary content.  Thomas Cole’s “Course of the Empire” cycle (1833-6), in which five paintings illustrate the dissolution of a civilization through the rise and fall of its architecture, immediately comes to mind.  These watchful narratives rife with trepidation form a  contextual framework that is centuries old, and DeDeaux continues the tradition.

A series of panels and a mantel piece showcasing and arrangement of silvered objects titled The Mantle (I’ve Seen the Future and It Was Yesterday), (2016-17), accompany these installations, as does a deflated ball hung from a scraggly tree branch titled Strange Fruit (2005).  The ball seems to be the most emotionally expressive sculpture in this grouping, as it sadly hangs witness, like a dying figure bound to a tree in a Goya print, to the audience passing by it and never once relieving it of its misery. It echoes with the eponymous and haunted song in Billie Holiday’s voice and recalls the confounding juxtaposition of remnants left in Katrina’s wake.  Both references serve witness to the catastrophic event of the storm. The newer context of Ida refreshes this melancholy content.

On either side of the room in which Where’s Mary projects is another gut-wrenching series of sculpture and video. One, Gulf to Galaxy (2021) is a floor-mounted light box holding two tons of smashed glass pieces collected by DeDeaux after The Storm in the shape of a hurricane.  As I write this on the last day of hurricane season, my mind is drowned in this image.

The other, Flood then Fire (2006), contrasts the element of water with the element of fire. The burned timbers from DeDeaux’s own home and studio, culled from the ruins of a fire that tore through the spaces after being flooded by Katrina. The only thing that survived was a photograph of DeDeaux’s father, which is inconspicuously positioned in a corner of the installation. It is reminiscent of Cornelia Parker’s 2006 installation Anti-Mass (2006), created from the framework of a church of mostly black congregation burned due to arson. Again, there is a connection with religious themes, and I wonder about the watchful eye of a god or gods that permit such atrocities, without which, in an optimistic light, creation may not be possible.

The Face of God, In Search of (1996-2021), on the right side of Where’s Mary, suggests similar content.  A projector beams abstract red and white imagery onto a small bed at the center of this installation, which is backed with panels playing videos of a cello that provides an eerie soundtrack, intermittently pulsating with striped lights.  Other imagery pops into view – faces watching as the viewer watches back.  The digital video acts like a dream sequence, which is often in sleeping life the surreal way of interpreting the problems and issues of waking life. 

A series of six panels with full-scale depictions of wrought iron doors so common in New Orleans architecture, titled America House, recreates an installation DeDeaux made in 1989-91. Rather than welcoming a viewer/neighbor, they serve as metaphors for prison bars, as they are juxtaposed with a framework of the same nature.  The viewer is allowed to enter to watch another video work, Super Convergence (The Day That Mickey Went to Baghdad), which pairs footage of the 1991 Superbowl with tape from the First Gulf War. These aired simultaneously in original context. The discomfort of the space incurs a prompt exit.

This leads the viewer to a digital projection titled Almost Touching You (1991), in which two nude figures, one exposed female and one male encased in plastic, move toward each other but never actually make contact. As the museum text notes, the content of the video lends itself to the difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic and our inability to make physical contact for most of the past two years.  The video concludes with both figures peering out at the viewer after both have been enamored with each other’s gaze.  They acknowledge our gaze watching them, seemingly both bemused by and nonchalantly aware of our observation of their dance.

The right exit of the retrospective is filled with a CB radio station and another digital projection titled Drummer Boy: A Call to Arms (1991). Again created against the backdrop of the First Gulf War, it refers to a Debord-ian sense of spectacle. The CB radio booth suggests attempts to communicate, which, as in the sci-fi movie Contact (1997), go darkly unanswered.

I have not addressed every installation or work in this exhibition, though I could lovingly gush on and on about DeDeaux’s retrospective.   DeDeaux has long been one of the most imaginative voices in this city, and it is both a pleasure and a reward to witness her work en masse.  While heartbreaking in its processing of horrific local and international events, and its contemplation of the future consequences of current destructive trends, the idea of “a space between worlds” holds hope.  The title of the exhibition suggests a liminal moment, a limbo, where change can absolutely occur.  In addition to intimating that timeless space artists tend to inhabit during the creative process, it also indicates a space where significant turns can be made to a positive outcome, one which must be closely and collectively watched for.