Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker “Invisible Hands”

Fridman Gallery

poster for Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker “Invisible Hands”

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The artists premier their latest work, Invisible Hands (2014), a video addressing social and financial power structures and the symbolic nature of money. The video shows the artists’ hands engaged in a series of shifting interactions centered around a collection of Panamanian “balboa” coins, named after Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, a Spanish conquistador credited with “discovering” the Pacific Ocean, and since appropriated as a national icon. Each balboa is worth a U.S. dollar, the official currency in Panama. The coins were minted once, in 2011, when forty million were put into circulation without retiring the equivalent number of dollars. They were nicknamed “martinellis” after Ricardo Martinelli, then ruling president, infamous for his corrupt, imperious style. After an initial fascination with their novelty, the populace soon deemed them a currency of lesser value.

Dry Season (2006) was Conlon and Harker’s first collaborative video. The idea for the video emerged spontaneously from a joint visit to a local recycling and glass fabrication center, where mountains of shiny, green glass are set in perfect visual counterpoint against the hills of the Panama City’s periphery. The video, a downpour of green glass bottles shattering onto a landscape of green glass, comments on mass consumerism, climate, and the ironic beauty of our refuse-filled landscapes.

Zinc is a ubiquitous building material in the tropics. In Tropical Zincphony (2013), the artists play with a typical scenario in Panama: a mango falls from a tree onto a corrugated zinc roof, landing with a reverberating bang. The mango in the video goes on a fanciful sensorial journey, rolling haphazardly through an abstract zinc landscape. At one point during its travels, the lone mango is overrun by a stampeding herd of wild mangoes, conjuring up notions of collectivity, individuality and solitude. Color, texture, sound, and rhythm are used whimsically to explore the roles of unpredictability and spontaneity of life in the tropics.

These three works highlight Conlon and Harker’s playful use of the inherent properties of everyday objects to generate incisive and poetic social criticism.

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Schedule

from September 12, 2014 to October 23, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-09-12 from 18:00 to 20:00

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