18 May – 24 June 2018
Wednesday – Sunday, 12 - 6PM

Landed is a two-person show by Danielle Dean and Jeanine Oleson. Showing together for the first time, the exhibition presents a video and installation from each artist: True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle), 2017 by Danielle Dean and Crossed Wires, 2017 by Jeanine Oleson.

True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle) is a two-channel video set in Cuney Homes, an affordable housing complex in Houston Texas. The video’s narrative echoes multiple historical accounts of Elmina Castle, one of the first prefabricated buildings, shipped from Portugal in 1482 and constructed on the Gold Coast in Ghana today. Dean plays the site manager of a new “Elmina Castle” development amid the existing Cuney Homes, while the artist’s sister and friends (who actually live in Cuney Homes) play the local residents. The building of Elmina Castle destroyed traditional village homes and heralded the destructive effects of European colonisation in Africa–by the 1600s the castle had become a major port in the Atlantic slave trade. Dean’s fictional, present day, Elmina Castle makes parallels with this event, placing Houston and its current rapid gentrification at the centre of the story. Reflecting on the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, the work explores the construction of subjectivity through surveillance technologies and displaced communities in the 21st century. Dean employs contemporary prefabricated media, such as the cartoon-like point-of-sale displays often used in marketing campaigns, to interrogate the continuities between the history of colonialism and today’s global consumer capitalism.

The video comes after Dean’s 2016 work A Portrait of True Red, which merges the story of its main character with a pair of red named Vampire (Vamps) Nike trainers. The undertone of violence and overlaying of language and experience is shared in both works and relates to Dean’s interest in the effect advertising, media and capitalist power structures have on our everyday lives.

Crossed Wires (2017) is a three-channel video filmed in the American South-West and in Manhattan. This dark comedy opens in a cave, with four characters who move through the production cycle of copper, from pit mines, refineries, a wire factory to city rooftops all the while trying to make connections with each other, site and sight. The performers interact with copper as it becomes wire, drawing a relationship with alienation, human labour and production. They sing, move and interact, grappling with language, definitions and descriptors and engaging in a dialogue with land, materiality and art. The video is shown alongside a weaving, Perspectus…a…um (2017), digitally designed but handmade by Oleson, a locational stage used in the last scenes of the video. The design is based on the grid that orients virtual objects in 3D imaging programmes and visual and personal perspective, as the title alludes. It compresses and expands view in ways that reference art history – perspective, modernism and artists such as Anni Albers, whose Bauhaus textiles functioned as objects and as labour that crossed over from the realm of the domestic to that of fine art and technology.

The work comes from Oleson’s expansive multi-disciplinary practice which includes photography, video, performance and sculpture. Her practice is unified through the utilisation of humour, perception, , and materials through queer and feminist position, often used as a mechanism to talk about labour, shared experience and the absurd conditions inherent in capitalism.

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Danielle Dean (b. Alabama, 1982) received her BA from Central Saint Martins in London (2006 ) and MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2012). She has been a fellow of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Residency Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Rijksakademie van Beeldene Kunsten, Amsterdam. Dean has held solo exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary art Detroit, 2018,  Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles (2017) and Studio Museum in Harlem (2016) and has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as SFMOMA Open Space, San Francisco, (2017 ?), Centre D’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva, Sculpture Center, New York, Goethe Institut Nigeria, Lagos, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, DiverseWorks, Houston, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Tate Modern, London. Dean lives between Los Angeles and Amsterdam. www.danielledean.art

Jeanine Oleson (b. 1974, Oregon) received her BA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995) and her MFA from Rutgers University). Oleson has exhibited and performed at venues including Hammer Museum, LA (2017); Commonwealth & Council, LA (2017); Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta (2016); SculptureCenter, New York (2016); Pierogi, Brooklyn (2015); New Museum, New York (2014); Beta Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2012) and Grand Arts, Kansas City (2009). She has received a Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant (2016); Creative Capital Artist Grant (2015); Foundation for Contemporary Art emergency grant (2014); a Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Regrant (2008 and 2009) and was in residence at Hammer Museum (2017), Urban Glass (2017), MacDowell Colony (2016), New Museum (2014), Smack Mellon Studio Program (2009), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2000). She also published two books about performance projects in 2012, “What?” and “The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse”. Oleson is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design and lives in Brooklyn.

 

If there’s anything we can do to address your accessibility needs for this exhibition please get in touch: [email protected]

Graphic Design by Cecilia Serafini