The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology
1412 W Alabama St, Houston, TX 77006
The Museum District across the street from The Menil and Rothko Chapel
By appointment until further notice. Ph. 713 8054207

Photos by artist Beatriz Bellorin

BEING AND EVERYTHING: 

POST ART by Dawn DeDEAUX 

Essay by Surpik Angelini

Founding Director

Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology

Long regarded as a futurist artist, Dawn DeDeaux’s multimedia, interdisciplinary installations overture art, anthropology, philosophy and science to framework a post human, post anthropocene discourse of extinction.  (1)

DeDeaux's Post Art trajectory was sharpened by Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of her habitat and most of her work, and the escalating extinction rate of planetary species. Her art turned more purposely to the materiality of the object, not as a representation of reality as we know it, nor as a found artifact remitting to Duchamp’s "readymades." Instead, DeDeaux embraces an all-encompassing notion of “object" understood as “everything” - an “everything” where even the causality of all things can be fathomed to radiate from the “object” itself into the unknown. (2)

Emerging out of the residue of planetary exile, DeDeaux’s objects are also conceived as a longing, an “algama” (Greek for treasure). With a potentially regenerative DNA for reproducing themselves - anything and everything at any time everywhere - DeDeaux calls to mind Graham Harman's image of an object "like a retrovirus injecting (its) DNA back into every object (it) encounters."

The experience of a “mise en scene” by DeDeaux evokes a subliminal, grander assemblage through the ghostly presence of its parts: rusted tools, shattered glass, debris, charred beams, burned books, postcards, collected ashes, soil from different parts of the world, broken idols, wooden and glass ladders and more. These post-apocalyptic objects no longer belong to the earth’s ecology: they have been excised, cut off, uprooted. But their uncanny appearance paradoxically retain the lost aura Walter Benjamin speaks of in his description of “Art in the Age of Reproduction” - reproduction being key to what DeDeaux’s work entails. Digitally seeping through a translucent printing process, her carefully conjured images reflect the tattered remains of a once-vibrant material world.

Dawn DeDeaux / Portrait Holding Dirt, Luxor Egypt, 1986. Photo by Cheryl Koralik

The objects DeDeaux selects and reproduces are neither projections looking forward nor memories looking backwards in time. They have lost forever their context. They no longer belong to culture. Culture - like our earth – is pulverized, evoking the sensation of standing in the sands of Egypt, where mineral particles and minute man-made shards mix indiscriminately in the topsoil -- an epiphany-induced observation for DeDeaux while walking through Luxor in 1982, mirroring Jane Bennett's encounter with a trash cluster of plastic debris and a rat on a Baltimore street that sparked the journey towards her seminal book Vibrant Matter.

Before stripping her own objects bare, in the early 1990s DeDeaux set hard focus on the absence of environmental ethics and the engines of extinction - resulting in the groundbreaking immersive media work that premiered at the 1996 Olympics, The Face of God, in Search of; and her first extensive landscape series - Postcards to Teddy Roosevelt while Thinking of Yves Klein - conceived for the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibition Landscape Reclaimed. In the series DeDeaux appears in self-portraiture, appropriating Yves Klein's daring flight far beyond his own Parisian window and into the deep abyss of American landscapes defaced by unchecked industry; standing in stark contrast to Teddy Roosevelt's romanticized celebration of the west.

Decades later DeDeaux’s Post Art again re-kindles the relevance of Yves Klein’s art, if seen through a post human, post anthropocene perspective. Klein’s anthropometries, his uncanny human silhouettes in blue, can now be understood as visions inspired by the ghostly shadows of post-human scenes on the walls of Hiroshima. Likewise, his announcement of mankind’s future telepathic communication can be seen as a presage of art at the end of time. Through powerful rhyzomes such as these, both Klein’s figurative shadows and DeDeaux’s dematerializing figures that vaporize into the void of outer space can be joined through communicating vessels, transcending the years that separate them, as precursors of Post Art. (3)

To conclude my introduction, I would like to quote fragments of a poem written by DeDeaux after her first visit to TransArt, just over a year ago. Her words seem to have sprinkled the seeds found in her TransArt exhibition Being and Everything.

"..the axis of objects...to reflect all things...
the caves within black holes filled with all matter... congealed into the gestalt...
gestures of humility...
being and nothingness...everything...
we must explore
the small universe
that brought us together."

Surpik Angelini / March 2020

About the Exhibition Title / BEING AND EVERYTHING

The exhibition title Being and Everything is inspired by a conceptual series DeDeaux created a few decades back surrounding historical ironies.  Among the series is a work titled Sartre's Trench that highlights unusual circumstances belonging to the relationship between German philosopher Martin Heidegger's work Being and Time (1927) and its influence on French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre's subsequent tome Being and Nothingness (1943).

Sartre spent two years mastering German to read Heidegger’s Being and Time. Ironically, the war broke out between France and Germany and Sartre began his reading of Heidegger from a French trench and finished the book as a prisoner of war in a German camp from 1940-41. DeDeaux’s animated drawings present Sartre as a shadow of a soldier sitting in the trench with a book and lantern. It is accompanied by sound of a man reading aloud in German with a French accent. Additional sounds of gunfire and arsenal explosions prompt flashes of light alternately illuminating backlit words embedded in the two earthen mounds: one offers the word “being” and the other gives only “nothingness”.

The Heidegger Thread Continues

Dedeaux shares that “in the decades that followed Sartre, new philosophical movements have emerged - Deconstruction, Post-Humanism, New Materialism… - and throughout most new theory there remains a connection to Heidegger, significantly for his stand to debunk human hierarchy in favor of an equitable inter-connectivity with other forms of life and objects. This is core to New Materialist thinking, and biologists and environmentalists have long since dethroned man as mega-culprit for planetary disruption. Most thinkers now advocate for a level playing field and a readdress of our relationships with animals, plants, inanimate objects and all matter. Vertical math isn’t adding up for me either so I am allowing myself to float within a cosmic current, inside the circular rotation of all matter.”

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION SELECTIONS

 Artist Dawn DeDeaux is an unlikely futurist based in an off-track neighborhood of ole’ town New Orleans. From here she builds spaceships in her backyard, and incessantly accumulates useless objects that fill all the nooks throughout her compound Camp Abundance.  For the Transart exhibition she brings to Houston a sampler of obtuse objects and other curious matter such as shattered glass, plastic, dirt, hair, ash, bone, discarded rusted tools, water samples, a Mona Lisa postcard, ladders for escapes, a ring section from her spaceship, and a century-old iron cauldron to stir the aforementioned remnants of the post-industrial / post-colonial world into a new stew to ponder the past, the now and the future tense.  

The exhibition aptly runs through the 2020 Hurricane Season, and fittingly presents a selection of works DeDeaux created in the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, acknowledging the climate catastrophes that have assaulted Houston in recent years. Works include her Water Markers series that measure varied flood water depths, and a version of her iconic Glass Floor - an illuminated ton of shattered glass hand-thrown by the artist into the spiral forms of both hurricanes and spinning galaxies.  A few selections from her recent two-year-run MotherShip exhibition at MassMoCA will also be on view, including one of her 24' apocalyptic landscapes rendered on aluminum panels, and her haunting human figures deteriorating inside protective suits and ineffective armature.

While in residence at Transart, DeDeaux will further develop her series Souvenirs of Earth  - producing newly configured object and matter assemblage grids that will be key feature components within the finale room of her upcoming career retrospective The Space Between Worlds, opening at New Orleans Museum of Art on October 16th (and running concurrent with Prospect.5, the city's international art triennial).  These post-anthropocene offerings underway at Transart will include a 10' section of her massive Dirt Bowl Table that unites earth specimens from around the globe to convey the destiny of planetary life and culture; and a wall grid assemblage of semi-obscured, discarded tools in a work titled Objects Veiled.

Transart will also present her 2010 video installation One Drop, a circular projection of a drop of water that vibrates in the wind like an angry globe. The work overtures the global inter-connectivity of waterways and the fragile preeminence of water as the source of life.

ABOUT DAWN DEDEAUX

Dawn DeDeaux has merged art with new technologies for decades to broaden art and audience engagement.  Her work has been exhibited in museums nationwide including the Whitney, Armand Hammer, the Aldrich Museum of Art, Ballroom Marfa, and a recent two-year exhibition at MASS MoCA. The New Orleans Museum of Art is organizing a career retrospective of her work titled The Space Between Worlds opening in October 2020 concurrent with the international triennial Prospect.5.  

DeDeaux is an American Academy in Rome Prize recipient as the Knight Foundation Southern Artist, Rauschenberg Foundation Artist in Residence, and 2014 Prospect Alumna Artist of the Year.  She was host/producer of Louisiana’s first radio arts program Art Now for NPR station WWNO, founding editor of the journal Arts Quarterly, among the eight original founders of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center and is on the Board of Directors of Prospect New Orleans.  As educator she established experimental multimedia art programming for a 6,000 inmate facility and has been Visiting Artist at numerous institutions including Maryland Institute College of Art, University of North Carolina, Princeton University and is advisor / mentor to School of Visual Arts (SVA) MFA Program.

DeDeaux is a native New Orleanian born on Esplanade Avenue next door to the Edgar Degas House and has remained a downtown 7th ward resident throughout her life. In her early teens she studied art with afro-futurist Martin Green, who painted planetary collisions on the walls of his humble "shotgun" home. Among her offerings to the magical surrealism of New Orleans, she is the winner of the 1976 Demolition Derby as the only female in a field of 35 contenders.

New York Times / Dawn DeDeaux: Between Apocalypses by Penelope Green

Q&A: Dawn DeDeaux discusses Forthcoming New Orleans Museum of Art Retrospective with Curator Katie Pfohl

Dawn DeDeaux / Photographer Using Space Travel / Aperture Magazine Editorial by Eva Diaz

Dawn DeDeaux Transart Exhibition / Country Road Magazine by Alexandra Kenon

FOOTNOTES / TRANSART SURPIK ANGELINI INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

(1)         I use the term post-humanism in the sense of Francesca Ferrando to refer to any theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition. In referencing the Anthropocene, I refer to the proposed geological era when human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

(2)         This glimpse of 'The End' was unexpectedly offered to DeDeaux while standing in the disfigured landscape that was once her family home following its complete destruction by the winds and waves of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This witnessing prompted her first large-scale reconfigurations of newly transformed matter such as shattered glass, earth, burnt wood and ash, and the crude mud markings (paintings) she created on salvaged wooden panels.  In contrast to her prior year immersed in advanced digital output, she found herself fully 'unplugged' in an unrecognizable world with no form of communication to convey that "Everything has changed...everything." (See DeDeaux's essay for Art in America, ‘The Death of New Orleans' / October 2005.)

(3)         The ongoing decade-long MotherShip Series by Dawn DeDeaux was first crafted around Stephen Hawking's hypotheses that mankind has 100 years to either correct the conditions for human life on earth, or figure out an exit strategy. His claim was made in a video interview nearly 15 years ago, and if true, that would give us only another 85 years. Since the claim, and prior to his death, Hawking would occasionally recalibrate his prediction.

Essay on "BEING AND EVERYTHING: a Post-ART" installation by New Orleans-based artist Dawn DeDeaux, by Surpik Angelini. Read it here

An Introduction about Dawn DeDeaux’s Exhibition “Being and Everything”: Selected Notes from Contributors Surpik Angelini, Dan Cameron, Dawn DeDeaux and Roberto Tejada. Download PDF here

Surpik Angelini and the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Texas, are delighted to present Vulnerable by Vicki Meek.

Dates: Sunday, November 17, 2019 - Sunday, January 5, 2020.
Hours: Wednesday to Sunday -- by appointment only.

Artist Statement

I rarely create work about myself. My personal angst has always been mine to work out other ways than in my art. However, for the first time since my divorce 25 years ago, I experienced a personal crisis that I felt a need to document in a creative conversation.

I could never imagine myself falling victim to my body. Up until the age of 66, I never had to take a single pill, nor had I experienced any major illness. Having a body that was running out of control because of illness never crossed my mind. But yet in 2016, there I was, inside a body that due to the loss of one small body part, a thyroid, was out of control, or at least that’s how it seemed to me.

Vulnerable is a body of work that examines what it feels like to lose control of one’s body once the main “regulator” of that body goes kaput. The kinds of thoughts one has are very interesting when they’ve lived their entire life being a control freak and in the blink of an eye, they must relinquish control to a little tiny pill. Erratic pains (in places you never had pain before); fatigue that attacks your once boundless energy (putting an abrupt halt to all plans you had for that day); appetite loss (something you never thought possible being the foodie that you are!) is simply baffling to someone who’s been the picture of health her whole life.

So in essence, a simple loss of a little body part triggered the need to totally re- examine what really matters in my life. The body is truly only a vessel that houses the soul; the soul is the most essential element of one’s being. So I’ve documented parts of my body that went haywire and combined the images of these parts with images of various kinds of regulators to visually talk about this phenomenon of a changing body that I no longer control. The use of a shower curtain as one of the elements in the show is a metaphor for being stripped naked as one is when in the shower, leaving me bare and vulnerable to the vagaries of illness. The small repetitive images of body parts with the control mechanisms signifies how the size of an organ isn’t necessarily proportionate to its importance given that the thyroid is tiny in comparison to, let’s say, your liver or your lungs. Yet it regulates the function of every organ, every sensory element, every emotion, in short it regulates you! I complete this body of work with images that represent my surrender to the Universe’s plan for my new life, one that releases my attachment to vanity and focuses on my spiritual being since that is who I am in the abstract and that is the “me”who ultimately connects with my fellow humans.

~Vicki Meek, 2019

Biography

Vicki Meek

Vicki Meek, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a nationally recognized
artist who has exhibited widely. Meek is in the permanent collections of the African American Museum in Dallas, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Connecticut. She was awarded three public arts commissions with the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Art Program and was co-artist on the largest public art project in Dallas, the Dallas Convention Center Public Art Project. Meek was selected as the only Dallas artists of ten national artists to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Nasher Sculpture Center which resulted in the commissioning of a site-specific installation that is now permanent at Paul Quinn College.

In addition, Meek is an independent curator and writes cultural criticism for Dallas Weekly with her blog Art & Racenotes (http://art-racenotes.blogspot.com). She has curated over 100 exhibitions for institutions like the Arthello Beck Gallery, African American Museum and D-Art Visual Art Center in Dallas, Project Row Houses in Houston, Carver Cultural Center in San Antonio, Kentucky State University Gallery, The Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Treme Museum in New Orleans, and C3 Gallery at Dallas Museum of Art.

With over 40 years of arts administrative experience that includes working as a senior program administrator for a state arts agency, a local arts agency and running a nonprofit visual arts center, Vicki Meek retired in March 2016 as the Manager of the South Dallas Cultural Center in Dallas, Texas, a full-service African-centered center that is a division of the City of Dallas Office of Arts & Culture. She served on the board of National Performance Network 2008-15 and was Chair from 2012-2014. Meek is a voting member of Alternate Roots and currently serves as a Mayor appointed Commissioner of the Arts & Culture Advisory Commission for the City of Dallas.

Vicki Meek is currently working as a full-time artist in Dallas. She also serves as CFO for Usekra: Center For Creative Investigation, a Costa Rican creatives retreat founded by acclaimed performance artist Elia Arce.

BIOGRAPHY

Mery Godigna Collet

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1959. Since the beginning of her career, Godigna Collet explores the coexistence between humans and environment through social and political issues. Her art work is supported by the versatile use of diverse materials, applied in installations, paintings, sculptures, photography and video, challenging the viewer through the use of new techniques and unconventional materials in the making of her art.

Godigna Collet’s artistic proposal is based on four research projects involving ways to concepts into matter. Her work is based in promoting a conscious use of natural resources and technology.

Mery Godigna Collet has participated in 34 solo and 40 group exhibitions in Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, New York, Miami, New Mexico and Texas.

Her works are at the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zulia (MACZUL) in Venezuela, the Galleria D’Arte Moderno Aroldo Bonzagni di Cento (Italy), the Latin American Art Museum, Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin TX, B98 Museum of Marfa, TX, Benson Collection in Austin TX and Petroleum Museum in TX.

She has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Siderúrgica del Orinoco, the Museum of Discurso de Angostura in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, the Centro Rómulo Gallegos of Latin American Studies (CELARG) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, Venezuela. Monument “la Rocca” in Cento, Italy, the Museum Pallazo Estense, the Centre D’Art Puyguerin-Vayolles, Monts sur Guesnes, France, the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, TX, the University of Texas in Austin, LHUCA in Lubbock TX, the Museum of the Americas in Miami, USA, and the Museo Archeologico di Belriguardo in Voghiera, Italy , as well as permanent and temporary public art works in Venezuela, Texas and Italy.

DOWNLOAD

“On Mery Godigna Collet’s INTERFERENCE” (PDF) | By Surpik Angelini | Houston, September, 2019