A Virtual-Reality Art Fair Powered by Artland
Denny Dimin Gallery is pleased to participate in the inaugural UNTITLED, ART Online, a revolutionary virtual reality art fair created in partnership with Artland. Our virtual booth will feature projects that are relevant to our current moment.
We are also pleased to partner with UNTITLED for a panel discussion, “Taking Up Space: Demanding Presence, Ceding Power, and Active Allyship.” The program will be live on July 23 at 2 p.m. but can be viewed at any time during the fair on their Program page. Artists Lorena Molina, Xia Zhang, M’Shinda Imani Abdullah-Broaddus, Josie Love Roebuck, Sammi Jones, and Jordan Tate discuss the necessity of institutional inclusion which demands a reconciliation of systemic inequity and demonstrates the value of ceding power and active allyship. The conversation will be moderated by arts and culture curator, producer and programmer, Donnamarie Baptiste.
Appending Appendices is the debut UNTITLED exhibition for five artists, Lorena Molina, Sammi Jones, Xia Zhang, M’Shinda Imani Abdullah-Broaddus, and Josie Love Roebuck, each of whom collaborated with Jordan Tate. Appending Appendices aims to upend the institutional modus operandi of “inclusion” that appends artists of color as an afterthought, and hopes to foreground the systemic inequity of artistic institutions. As Justine Ludwig wrote in her essay on the original project, Prefaces / Appendices, “Tate harnesses the power of the white cube as a validation, as a signifier of what is art as value.” The work is an extension and revision of Prefaces / Appendices, which responded to how the gallery or museum installation photograph created value for the artworks contained therein. This most recent iteration hopes to demonstrate the urgency and necessity of broader institutional inclusion by inserting the work of artists who are non-white and not endemic to art world institutions into the museum background.
We are pleased to exhibit a work by Paula Wilson that is especially significant to our current moment. Living Monument was shown as a video installation in The Light Becomes You at the New York gallery in 2018-2019. The two-channel video presents footage on one screen of the removal of the General Beauregard confederate monument in New Orleans in May 2017. The second screen depicts a covert performance by Wilson in which she danced at dawn atop the remaining base of the statue before law enforcement interceded. The video was shot and edited by Vashni Korin with audio “Speaking in My Native Tongue” by Jamel Henderson. Watch on Vimeo.
The booth will feature a wall of new works by Erin O’Keefe. A continuation of her Built Work series, the photographs in the booth are still life arrangements of wood blocks and planes. Both straightforward and strange, O’Keefe’s work continually investigates what makes space “real” The way our eyes reconcile our understanding of the world, usually a seamless and transparent situation, is open to question. The dissonance between experience and image is apparent, and this uncertainty makes possible a kind of naïve perceptual awareness; seeing things as they are.The selection for UNTITLED, ART Online constitute the first time Denny Dimin Gallery has exhibited her new, unique photographic works.
We will debut two new works by Sean Fader from the series Best Lives. This body of work is also on view at the New York gallery in his solo exhibition Thirst/Trap, which runs through August 21st. Best Lives is a series of collaborative portraits that focuses on the role of the digital photograph today, addressing the messy pleasures and conflicting impulses that characterize the queer uses of digital portrait photography in social media. Best Lives began with a custom smartphone app built by Fader that searched Instagram for images with at least one of thirty popular queer hashtags such as #instagay, #nonbinary, and #genderfluid. These images were then sorted by geotag and alerted Fader if they were within a ten-mile radius. Once notified, Fader then wrote to the poster to ask if they would be interested in meeting to talk and make a collaborative photograph. In accordance with his sitters’ self-visualizations, Fader created these large-scale, heroic portraits—each with their own ornate, custom, gilded frame.
