Angela Dufresne - Enlightenment Covers
June 12 - July 24, 2010
Opening reception Saturday, June 12, 6-9pm
Angela Dufresne, Bierstadt with Fly Fisherman, 2010. Oil on canvas, 84" X 132".
For Enlightenment Covers, Angela Dufresne evokes the 18th Century art critic and philosopher, Denis Diderot's illustrations from the Encyclopédie (a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts) and interjects her own characters. In this, Dufresne remains true to her previous bodies of work in which she inserts her own experience,imagination and reality into fictional or mythical narratives - Fassbinder films, futuristic landscapes and Bob Dylan albums just to name a few. The result is a slice of Dufresne's experience as well as a window into a holistic experience of rerepresentation, as these paintings are not mere fantastic depictions or "mash-ups" but rather tangible depictions of Dufresne's imaginative investigation into existing things, perhaps not unlike Diderot intended.
According to Dufresne:
"Audience or rather proletariat or the bourgeois witness was never really prepared to receive theater or painting so actively as Diderot or later the Modernists had imagined; an active, enlightened audience, equally participatory in the action of the theater or painting. The viewer became one of two things - passé and taste driven, even kitsch loving, or an outright intellectual, alienated and living in the confines of safety. Both dispositions were false, reductive and irrelevant to the actual experience of art that Diderot, and the producers of art were having. The only logical answer that resulted, centuries later from Diderot, decades after the Mods, informed by many 20th century movements was Punk - if the audience wouldn't reduce the space between the creator and the things created, then the performer had to do it. The artist had to shrink the gap. Kitsch had to be utilized because the American consumer could never bridge it; they didn't have the tools. This is the desperate beauty of pop and punk. What's the difference between Yves Klein leaping from the window and Iggy Pop leaping off the stage? Nothing - they are the same act of relief from the alienation of art - it's inability to reach the people it desires to speak to.
My work makes the inverse leap - from the audience back onto the stage, as an active but partially ill-informed devotee to a past that never was; covering Diderot, Beirstadt as of late, Fassbinder, Losey, or Lloyd Wright in prior works to disperse my own alienation from my role as audience and artist with the only tools that I have been given: pictures of mountain peaks, fluffy Impressionistic paintings, fishermen, kitsch tricks, pretty and nasty colors among other things. I re-embody those stories, those spaces; leave them reconfigured, fucked with, revitalized, if a little bastardized as well. It is all I am capable of. If reality TV and Youtube can do it - so can I as a painter."
Since receiving her MFA from Tyler School of Art in 1998, Angela Dufresne has exhibited widely in the U.S and abroad. In 2009 Dufresne had concurrent solo exhibitions in New York at CRG Gallery and Monya Rowe Gallery. Dufresne's work has also been exhibited at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT), University of Richmond Museum (Richmond, VI), Galeria Glance (Turin, Italy) and The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA) among others. This is her second solo exhibition with Kinkead Contemporary. Dufresne lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
