one pic wednesday. Violet Dennison
O earth, O earth, Return! by VIOLET DENNISON
exhibition view at Allen & Eldridge (within James Fuentes), New York City, New York
image courtesy the artist and Allen & Eldridge, NY
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At the James Fuentes projects space called Allen & Eldridge, American artist VIOLET DENNISON is presenting an exhibition entitled O earth, O earth, Return! which features sculpural works made of office equipments like the black bases of the office chairs, that she combined with shapes cast in concrete. Elsewhere in the exhibition space, shrubs of twisted metallic tubes as well as tubs of greek food mounted on six-legged pods recall misfigured bodies, roughhewn monuments, and cute characters alike.
I recommend to read the press release written by artists SCOTT KEIGHTLEY (emergency worker), GRAHAM HAMILTON as well as VIOLET DENNISON which seems to be the overall structuring element of the project.
Workers we, our Vessels full of pollen, falling down. She sees a man bellowing madly on a street corner, overflowing with love for every intangible thing. Dionysus is a mad man living on the street, she thinks, and she enjoys the idea. But she is alone, and she is lost, and she feels like nothing other than the only witness to the miraculous circumstance that is herself. Regret swells in her breast. A zerg swarm of coffee cups animated by some hidden hive mind come alive at night in my studio. Under a magical spell, cast by a wizard, they march about the cold office space making little squealing noises communicating with each other, their metal legs click-clacking to and fro. In the night they build massive hands out of office chairs. I think they are hands for the Wizard. Maybe she is now body-less and hopes to build herself a new form. When her new body is whole she will take night walks around Gowanus. She will stroll fourteen feet tall, roll around on her hands and feet of wheeled chairs, bound over the canal and play in the massive trash heaps. The coffee cup workers know nothing but their task at hand. They have wrapped their being around doing. To be constituted by another’s desires is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the laborer from his product. To be vulnerable, able to be disassembled, re-assembled, exploited as a reserve labor force, seen less as workers than as servers. A young female is bound to the pulsating cube by many wires. She is slowly rotating in mid-air. Each part of her body is highlighted as it is named. Mouth, Ear, Thigh, Ankle, Breasts, Hair, Back, Toe. These ingredients are a soup, and the stock of it is my time, my labor. The body is forced to repeat strange, alienated, hostile movements. To sleep, nay, perchance to stay wide awake. 500 million sold annually, full of happiness and coffee lover like a shipwrecked astronaut he turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of life. “All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?” The firm smoothness! The trembling! A mouth that is two mouths wet with saliva. A warm ocean that feels like the beginning of everything. In another room she is spinning the silver ring around reading the entire Greek tragedy that is inscribed within it. The world shifts and she is a boot licking a boot and a leg climbing up a leg. A chest straddling a chest. A tongue so deep in your ear it is tickling the brain. Hundreds of hands are swirling all over her, unbuttoning her pants and rubbing the inside of her mouth and slipping under her skin to peer out of her eyeballs. A spider from another dimension consumed him with utter tenderness. They run in terror from where the treadmill belt folds and the world ends.
O earth, O earth, Return!
You still have a few days to view in person O earth, O earth, Return! at Allen & Eldridge in New York before it closes on Sunday, March 15, 2015.
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