Bumpkin Dandy

Dean Project Gallery

511 West 25th Street

New York City

March 1st - April 14th, 2012

This new body of work occupies a place of contradiction. It peels back the curtain slightly to expose the contradictory nature of human materiality. Disparate visual languages are united in uncanny and seemingly callow configurations to mimic those weird and curious objects also known as collectibles. Straight-forward, simple, and naïve while also celebrating refinement, “Bumpkin Dandy” is a show about a clash of high and low cultural practice to examine our frivolous and contradictory relationship to nature. It is also a distorted reflection, a tweaked image of art as objects of taste, and as such it implicates certain views of folk art, artisanship, and aesthetics.

Irony has been defined as “sincerity with a motive”. “Bumpkin Dandy” is ironic while adversely representing the simple American lifestyle. These works sincerely invest in the language of objects to create uncanny icons. Sign-value takes precedence over use-value as a motive to exploit the transformation under which nature must go to become aesthetic objects. Instead of being merely a reflection on form, this show is an investigation of culture – about a culture that relates to nature through mediation. As an installation, the works evoke a kind of roadside attraction. Bright lights and novelties negotiate the nebulous space to create a sense of place in the middle of the iconic American nowhere – a place one might stop out of curiosity, on their way to somewhere else.

Daniel A Bruce

Daniel A Bruce