Pas De Deux

June 26 - August 10, 2024

Artists: Kim Benson, Moyra Davey, Justine Di Fiore, David Goldes, Jay Heikes, Pao Houa Her, Alexa Horochowski, Ruben Nusz, JoAnn Verburg

In his short story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939), Jorge Luis Borges discusses the reproduction of a seminal text far removed from the historical and social context of the original. Menard, the titular character, channels his own experience to precisely rewrite chapters of Cervantes’ Don Quixote without directly copying the text. Of course, the Quixote as written by an early twentieth century Frenchmen carries far different meanings and connotations than the Quixote as written by a 16th century Spaniard, and to Borges, Menard’s conceptual project invites a new manner of reading: 

"Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique – the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. This technique fills the calmest books with adventure. Attributing Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or James Joyce – is that not sufficient renovation of those faint spiritual admonitions?"

Discursive questions surrounding authorship and context lie at the root of Menard; the same have been contemplated throughout the history of art. As in literature, time is all important: contemporary art exists in a Heraclitean swirl of discussion and context that is constantly in flux.

"Every artist works relentlessly to shed the irresistible references of their idols, some more than others, but those influences never truly go away. They are ghosts that forever haunt the artist and without constant exorcisms they become too seductive to ignore, usually grabbing hold every once-in-a-while for a Faustian pas de deux - a bargain that is a simple one; material pleasures over spiritual ones, resulting in a derivative, didactic conduit instead of an original, abstract belief system. But maybe originality is overrated or a flat out myth..." (Jay Heikes)

With references to Giotto, Michelangelo, Morandi, and Paul Thek, among others, the featured artists in Dreamsong’s summer group show explore what it means to appropriate another artist’s work, either directly or slyly, wholesale or in part, and how distinctions between homage, facsimile, commentary, subversion, and criticism bend and shift, allowing the past to be ceaselessly reread in the present.

Learn more here.

David Goldes: Unpredictable Drawings

Artwork by David Goldes
Text by Pavel S. Pys

from $60.00

David Goldes (b. 1947) uses chemical and electrical transformations of materials such as graphite and silver to form the basis of his work. Many of the changes that occur on the drawing surfaces through the agency of high voltage electricity and sulfur compounds are only partially controllable. Coupled with Goldes’ imagery a hybrid practice of intention and unpredictability emerges. For the artist, this combination resonates with many of the uncertainties that we currently face. In the electrified works, the drawings yield evidence—blackened burns, holes and surface scarring—while the chemically altered silver leaf works show unplanned colored areas of oranges, greens and blues. During the development of this work, organized and geometric forms gave way to abstract, fragmented, biomorphic forms. Ideas referencing instability and balance, the effects of proximity and adjacency, belief and illusion, as well as microscopic imaginings became intertwined with pressing social concerns of social upheaval and the global pandemic. The work also offers a contrary motif rooted in the aesthetic qualities of the materials used, their properties, and the artist’s delight in harnessing ways of transforming them. Unpredictable Drawings evolved from a related photographic practice based on the artist's observations of physical phenomena related to electricity. This new body of work seeks to materially present the action of electricity and chemical change in the most direct fashion possible. The drawings are a shift from a ‘picture of’ to ‘the thing itself’ and can be seen as an expansion of Goldes' interest in a multilayered representation of phenomena.

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