|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
Bill De Lottie to exhibit at Real Art Ways' Three Solo Shows opening July 29. |
Three Solo Shows: July 29- September 25
Bill De Lottie explores the metaphysical, and embraces process as necessary to artistic expression. He will be working on his installation – tweaking, altering, adding, and adjusting - for the entire run of the show. “The bottom line for me is to create a piece that will enchant, that captivates you to be in the moment as well as unleashing a whole world of thought and fantasy.” De Lottie was selected for the Whitney Biennial in 2000. De Lottie lives and works in Connecticut, and is a true original. .: Bill De Lottie Essay by Susan Classen Sullivan
|
Essay on Bill De Lottie There is an important event taking place, of significance well beyond the confines of its space at Real Art Ways, Center for Contemporary Arts, in Hartford Connecticut. It is the Bill De Lottie exhibition “I can not connect these lines with the lines in my face,” which delivers so startling and welcome an experience that all baggage is dropped at the door. It is a complex installation involving video, small dense printed images, large-scale wall drawings and projection, and a three-dimensional painting. While these are the components of the exhibition (each complete, and compelling individually), it is through their relationship to one another, and to the space itself, that a kind of majestic intensity occurs. Together the colors, forms and interactions, charged with presence and meaning, jolt the viewer into an experience of unadorned reality. It is the energy of the work, spilling out of its edges, that first pulls us to it. The installation so activates space that you begin to take it in just by breathing. The palpable presence of space in the work mirrors the Buddhist principal “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” The character of the space we encounter creates a vibrating environment in which the artist explores form, thought, emotion, and concept. And it, space, is the only constant in the work, tangibly supporting all of the dynamic events and interactions that take place. This use of space is central in the three-dimensional painting in which small to mid-sized square, circular and rectangular panels of vividly colored cloth are layered and thrust on poles horizontally, at varying heights, from an entire wall. While in traditional painting artists use color, form and composition to create an illusion of depth and space, in De Lottie’s work they actually inhabit space. There is a real physicality to how these lanced shapes and colors, push into us and pull us toward them. In instances when the fabric is stretched taunt over the tip of a pole it registers in our bodies as do the communications between colors and forms. This method of interacting with the work reflects how we perceive and experience not only visual information, but also thoughts, feelings, and one another. Space is also a major component in the larger than life wall drawing, which encompasses an entire wall of the installation. Here figures and forms that share a similar power and style to those in Philip Guston’s later work, are primarily rendered with black acrylic paint that has been saturated with black pigment. The resulting surface soaks in and holds light giving the forms a vivid three-dimensionality. This is intensified, as are the colors of the panel painting, by strong halogen lights the artist strategically places on floor shining directly at the work. The result is pure unadulterated form and color. The forms in these wall paintings are explosive, precise and their relationship to the wall and to us is continually in question. The iconic elements used in this wall drawing, including a young girl, a woman, a cow and a military tank, give us perhaps our most direct experience of the searing honesty of De Lottie’s work. These elements, after being extensively tested, and earning a place with the artist, which can often takes years, are stark renderings of our most basic desires and inclinations. They serve as tools for De Lottie to explore the essential aspects of human nature. The little girl embodies our inherent vulnerability and our hunger and power to use and corrupt it. In another part of the drawing we encounter a woman (strong, attractive) shooting a cow. The bullet, a repeated form slowly moving over the picture plane towards the cow relays both woman’s ability to accept or reject her forced connection to the tamed-milk and meat-giving domesticity symbolized by the cow. This interaction communicates as well how we all sometimes use, to our own advantage what may seem to most threaten us. But all this can change in an instant as the artist changes the placement of these elements and what they are relating to. The fact that De Lottie interchanges the iconic elements in the work adds to its radical nature. How would the snowman interact with the young girl. What would happen if the woman were paired with the military tank? This again relates to the use of space as described in the Buddhist belief that everything exists in an environment of space; thoughts, feeling, concepts, people, objects etc. and that these are all impermanent. This is a system in which, each element is individually whole and connected to everything it encounters and speaks of our own endless interactions and interrelatedness. And even more to the ultimate state of aloneness we are all present in. The fact that the visual elements in his work are continually interchangeable, is ruthless, relentless, heartbreaking and compassionate in the same way nature is where nothing, ever, stays the same. Their presence is found throughout the installation in the form of drawings and images from popular culture. These women reveal more about society and us as individuals than they ever do about themselves. Women serve as an element against which the artist tests events and truths and they serve to reflect many aspects of human consciousness. The artist uses women to document our urges and weakness without ever forcing them to give up their inherent mystique. We see this in the “Jeep Video”, during which a small tin vintage toy, featuring a peppy little solider in a jeep labeled, “Watch Joe Go”, “Jet Propelled”, “Supersonic Speed, “G.I.Joe Jouncing Jeep” and “Atomic Brakes” who speeds himself into our most tender and perhaps secret places of identity. This soldier is a busy little busy body, who often seems to be incessantly driven by a “fuck it or kill it” mentality. Placed in front of a series of iconic images and objects from both popular culture, and past and present societal and political events his goal largely seems largely to be pillage and destroy. In one image he is getting ready to bump himself into the “slutty” Barbie, behind who is the page of a magazine featuring an image of a woman dressed in S&M style lingerie. Small barely legible text, located above the women’s head, cryptically reads “material that did not represent violence or cause it. Erotica became the code.” This seems to be commentary on our apparent need to use one another for self-gratification as well as our desire to initiate, and be the subject of this impulse. Motoring himself into scenes of bound women, and images of Abu Ghraib he reveals societal and personal inclinations involving sex, and power. This piece is, of course, also documentation of the artist’s position on the current United States Administration and his perception of it as misleading and destructive nature. He uses the Jet Propelled G.I. Joe to demonstrate the mindless insistency for Joe and the government to destroy anything in its path. More than that however these images show the cause and effect of putting our personal or societal needs before all else. Bill De Lottie’s work in this exhibition can also be mythic, as in the allegorical video series, shown on a computer, which presents a series visual legends of human behavior (in one a women frolics with then bites the head off of a rabbit) and documents the artist‘s process, which appears harrowing in its epic intensity. We watch as larger than life, fully realized figures and forms, rendered with raw immediacy in black paint, are again and again painted over and transformed as the narratives evolve demonstrating that De Lottie is willing to surrender everything and will stop at nothing to have the stories told. We see that the process of telling the stories is as aggressive as the events they depict. The scaled down computer screen size version we are see of the work reminds us how little we know of what goes into the making of his work. There is also a wall of small, 81/2” by 11”, printed images that chronicle both the Jeep Video and the making of the large wall drawings. These are lush and compelling, denser than in their original form, and more intimate allows us to privately and personally experience ourselves in them. The fact that they are tacked to the wall using one staple at the top center, causing them to curl slightly reinforces the impermanence of events, thoughts and feelings, as well as our tendency to discard or ignore what might be most central to our existence. For the viewer experiencing De Lottie’s work is like being a child with a new toy that is all consuming and you don’t ever want to put down. All of it embodies De Lottie’s brilliance and the years of uncompromising consideration it has been given. Making this exhibition so unfathomably real and immediate that those thirsty for art in its purest form will swallow it in great gulps. It seems with this exhibition everything has changed and there is no going back. It will be difficult to accept less. De Lottie uses no crutches so there is nothing getting in the way with our direct experience of the work. And there is no pandering to the viewer here; no looking over the shoulder making sure it’s doing the right thing. Instead, we encounter the very elements that inhabit our psyche. And they are served straight up. His work is already known internationally, in part through its inclusion in the 2000 Biennial at the Whitney Museum in New York, the definitive exhibition acknowledging the major forces in the art world today. There is the urge to make Bill De Lottie a hero of contemporary Art. And while he deserves the mantel it may be too big of a risk to officially bestow it. Such celebrity making may be part of our culture but is has been a powerful pollutant to the work of a number of artists in the past. Better perhaps to be patient, remember, and wait for what he will off up next because clearly there is nothing he’s not willing to give us. ~ Susan Classen Sullivan
|
|
