Dana Bell / Alasdair Duncan / Don Voisine
14 January – 3 March 2012
Opening reception: Saturday, January 14, 2012: 6-8pm
@
Theodore:Art
56 Bogart St. Brooklyn - L train to Morgan stop
MAP --> http://tinyurl.com/TheodoreArt
The unity of the thing remains mysterious as long as one considers its different qualities as so much data belonging to worlds entirely distinct from sight, from smell, from touch, etc.
~ merleau ponty.
Theodore:Art is pleased to present the first exhibition in our new home in Bushwick: work by Dana Bell, Alasdair Duncan, and Don Voisine.
These three artists, while creating very different work, all touch on the possibilities of communicating ideas in a space outside of language. The familiarity of signifiers – form and gesture – is offered without the reliable connection of a signified or finite meaning. A viewer is confronted with evasive focus: unspoken directions, mute expressions, opaque progressions. The potential “unity of the thing” is proffered as a semblance of infinite suggestion.
Armed with a formalist’s vocabulary, an eye for the nuances of gesture, and a tendency towards dark, absurdist humor, Dana Bell has delved into cinema’s rich history and emerged with a complex study of physicalized language. While turning the aesthetic identity of her filmic source on its head, Bell’s reductive process transforms filmic narrative, creating a semiotic study that reveals the subtle manipulations and learned artifice within human expression, while breaking the connection between narrative arc and the nuances of gesture.
Alasdair Duncan makes “signs for the future”, stand-ins; not futurological predictions, rather they are emblems of the not yet imagined. Duncan is interested in making art that reflects an expansive, confident and optimistic outlook, that the world as it is now can be made different and better. At a time when the future is represented substantially in terms of fears rather than opportunities, Duncan’s work manifests the hope of real affirmative social and material change through conditions of possibility which exist now, but which are beyond our view from the current state of affairs.
Don Voisine’s paintings impress with a complexity and meditative quality that belie their scale. Space is defined by restrictions, controlled by borders, limited in access, via a very few well-chosen elements. Voisine creates uncanny spatial depth and structure through color, texture, contrast, and light. The layering and overlapping of black planes, both translucent and opaque, evoke both redaction and seduction without answer.
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Dana Bell had solo shows at Dvorak Sec Gallery, Prague; Kressling Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia and Louis V ESP, Brooklyn. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Dvorak Sec Gallery, Secret Project Robot, The Flag Art Foundation, and D'Amelio Terras Gallery. Bell received her BFA from Wayne State University and a MFA from Maine College of Art. Bell lives and works in Brooklyn.
Alasdair Duncan has had work included in numerous group shows in the UK and France, and was commissioned to make the signature artwork and signage for the 9th Congress of the New Lacanian. He is a graduate of the Royal Academy School Post Graduate program, and received a BA from Goldsmiths College. Duncan lives and works in London. Theodore:Art will present a solo exhibition of Duncan’s work in 2012.
Don Voisine’s most recent solo exhibitions include McKenzie Fine Art, New York and Icon Contemporary Art, Brunswick, Maine His work is included in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, National Academy Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Peabody Essex Museum and the Missoula Art Museum in Missoula, MT. Voisine was elected into membership to The National Academy of Art in 2010. Voisine was elected a member of American Abstract Artists in 1997 and became President of the group in 2004. Voisine was born in Fort Kent, Maine, and moved to New York City in 1976. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
SELECTED IMAGES
For more information and images, please contact:
Stephanie Theodore at 212.966.4324 or at theodoreart@gmail.com
