I don’t know how the New Orleans Museum of Art can ever take down the Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds (though it ends January 22) because it is absolutely perfect and if I’m a curator or director there I’m definitely thinking about what board members and big givers I can start a conversation with about how we need to build a new wing and voila this is our centerpiece. It needs never leave.
Daisy Space Clown in Black Field
The Mantle (I’ve seen the future and it was yesterday)
Granted, for obvious reasons I didn’t attend a lot of shows this past year, but no matter, this would have been my favorite anyway.
The Face of G-d, in search of
The museum describes:
…the first comprehensive museum exhibition for the pioneering multimedia artist Dawn DeDeaux. Since the 1970s, DeDeaux’s practice has spanned video, performance, photography, and installation to create art that exists at the edge of the Anthropocene. Anticipating a future imperiled by the runaway population growth, breakneck industrial development, and the looming threat of climate change, DeDeaux has long worked between worlds of the present and the future.
And this could have been dark and dangerous and uncomfortable, and it was all of those things, but not so much that it left one feeling awful, rather introspective and more considerate about situations that need more attention.
Target, After Jasper Johns
Watermarker Highrise
From NOMA: Since the 1970s, her art has addressed an ever-widening series of gulfs: between people, between cultures and communities, and ultimately between humans and the Earth itself. Living and working in Louisiana—one of the fastest disappearing landmasses in the world—DeDeaux has been grappling with urgent questions about Earth and humanity’s survival for the last fifty years. As we face a world increasingly imperiled by rising waters, roiling temperatures, unchecked pandemics, and escalating social strife, the future DeDeaux’s work has long foreseen is now.
Postcards to Teddy Roosevelt
Gulf to Galaxy
Where’s Mary video and Mary statue
For DeDeaux, physicist Stephen Hawking’s prediction in the early 2000s that humans have 100 years left—not to save the planet, but to figure out how to flee—sounded an alarm bell that humanity has a limited-time-only opportunity to come together and co-exist. Her art implores us to seize our last opportunity to heal past divisions, counter present inequality, and forestall future strife.
The Space Shroud
Dirt Bowl Table
CB Radio Booth
