NYAB Event - "Dana Bell / Alasdair Duncan / Don Voisine" Exhibition

"Dana Bell / Alasdair Duncan / Don Voisine" Exhibition

Theodore:Art

This event has ended.

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.