NYAB Event - David Dixon “DIXIE”

David Dixon “DIXIE”

Cathouse FUNeral

This event has ended.

“Dixie” is artist David Dixon’s sometimes nickname. He was raised in North Carolina and is now founding director of Cathouse FUNeral, wherein each summer he mounts a solo-exhibition of his recent work. Last year’s was titled Heroic Social Worker, which, like DIXIE, was self-reflexive. Cathouse FUNeral’s current gallery walls, which were built to cover and preserve last year’s aesthetic efforts, will be cut through, allowing for aspects of Heroic Social Worker to be present in DIXIE.

DIXIE confronts the South’s history of slavery, exploited labor and fraught racial relations, specifically the struggle for emancipation in the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Drawing from both African Kongo and European Enlightenment systems of thought, the show’s centerpiece, Master/Slave, is a tight grid of twelve stretched canvases representing Confederate flags that are “batiked with blood” and have been roughly sawed in half, the “X” of the “Southern Cross” (a negation) flipped around and reformed into an open lozenge shape. Installed adjacent to Master/Slave is The Clansman, a large free-standing fresco that is awash with swirling stains of blood and affixed with a rusted metal halo.

Acknowledging multi-authorship as a fact of artistic production, Dixon in DIXIE expands notions of identity to include others, both fictional and real. The large triptych, Dao de Dixie, is signed by a character, “George”, from an upcoming film by Dixon, and is dated “1986”; several pieces in DIXIE were conceived from George’s point of view. Other works have Dixon commissioning 19th century American Romantic landscape paintings from an on-line Fine Art distributor that uses cheap Chinese labor to execute skilled, kitsch copies of, for this exhibition, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church and William Trost Richards. One of these canvases is signed with the number: LA2988RCH-40.

In light of multiple national news stories that demonstrate America’s racist past is not past, we do not presume that Cathouse FUNeral or Dixon’s work in particular is the place to resolve these issues, but we are doing what we can. On September 2nd, we will screen and thoroughly discuss D.W. Griffith’s infamous film about the Reconstruction era, Birth of a Nation, which is 100 years old this year. More information to follow.

DIXIE is Cathouse FUNeral’s thirteenth show.

David Dixon’s work was most recently featured in Self: Portraits of Artists in Their Absence at the National Academy Museum (NYC, 2015) and Harvesting from Cathouse FUNeral at Ryan Lee Gallery (NYC, 2014). Dixon has worked primarily as an artist, filmmaker and curator, his visual work having been shown at Show Room (NYC, 2013), Biennale de Belleville (Paris, 2012), Sculpture Center (NYC, 2009), Antenna (New Orleans, 2009), film screenings have been at Anthology Film Archive (NYC, 2011), MoMA (NYC, 2005), The Kitchen (NYC, 1998) and curatorial projects with Nuyorican Poets Cafe (NYC, 2012), Winkleman Gallery (NYC, 2011), and now at Cathouse FUNeral. He holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design (1992) and an MFA from Cornell University (2010).