Elizabeth Dee Gallery
545 West 20th Street, 212-924-7545
Chelsea
November 1 - November 15, 2012
Reception: Thursday, November 1, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
Elizabeth Dee is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Adrian Piper in gallery 3 featuring one work: Adrian Piper’s Vote/Emote (1990) one of her most significant political interactive installations.
“Vote/Emote comprises four voting cubicles wherein, upon entering, one is faced with a photograph of protesters from the Civil Rights era behind a windowpane. A notebook asks the viewer to write responses to directives such as LIST YOUR FEARS OF WHAT WE MIGHT THINK OF YOU or LIST YOUR FEARS OF HOW WE MIGHT TREAT YOU. Piper thereby transforms the sacred site of rational democratic participation into its opposite: a profaned confessional booth, wherein one’s fears and anxieties, even when repented of and forgiven, are increasingly difficult to dispel.” -Jordon Troeller, Artforum
Since the late 1960s, Adrian Piper has forged a unique artistic practice that infused classical Minimal sculptural form with explicit political content and introduced issues of race, gender and identity politics into the vocabulary of Conceptual art. She has deployed permutation and seriation—which at the time that Piper began using them were considered non-traditional artistic media—as strategies for investigating the infinite variability of perceptual form and content. In recent years, her artwork has begun to intersect more explicitly with her philosophical work, resulting in a reconsideration of space, time, and infinity in defining the limits and potential permutability of the self as situated on a pre-established grid defined by social and political variables of race, sex, class conflict, and social relations.