Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things
The title of this exhibition plays on the title of the 1966 book The Order of Things, by Michel Foucault. The first chapter, Las Meninas, examines the painting Las Meninas by Velásquez that was painted in 1656. This essay, etched into copper plates, became the matrix from which series of prints, artists books, a video, and veils have been developed. The text is variously disrupted through absences, gaps, and overlays. The disrupted text is an attempt to find a visual metaphor for the way in which an ordered world, grammar, has been rendered disordered.
I envision this exhibition on the first floor of the Gallery. The video Blue Sequence would be projected against wall B and the installation Blueprint for a Breathless World consisting of 12 veils would be in the adjoining space (GJK) spaced approximately a meter apart. A fan that would make the veils move slightly, as if caught in a breeze, would be included in this space.
Meno Parkas Gallery, Kaunas, Lithuania
Installation image of Blueprint for A Breathless World
Blueprint For A Breathless World
Medium: digital print,
voile
This installation was first developed as a sight specific installation in Galway, Ireland. It was then exhibited as part of the exhibition Blueprint for The DisOrder of Things at the Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg.
Across these veils three characters interact, overlap, and infect one another: the ‘princess’, from the painting Las Meninas by Velásquez, a Plague doctor and a dog that bears witness to the narrative unfolding before him. The landscape in which this takes place depict mountain ranges that map the rise and fall of the pandemic. In the night sky above float spacecrafts and astronauts, attached to the astronauts are the tubes and oxygen tanks needed for breathing. Below the tumult, in the quiet depths, swim schools of salmon.
Links: https://vimeo.com/716056279
Blueprint Sequence
Video Projection 7 minutes
Size: Adjusted to fit wall B
Screenshot from Blue Sequence
Laboured breathing, a machine that clicks, distant sirens and the guttural sound of throat singing in a technique known as Umngqokolo, particular to the Eastern Cape, form the soundscape to this video. In this sequence planets turn, the ‘hand of god’ sprays down infectious drops and the dog bows its head and lifts it again, sensing an unseen presence.
The Dog in the Night: Christine Dixie’s Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things Extract from an essay by Professor Bronwyn Law Viljoen. ( Wits University)
“What is so clearly also at play in this work, expressed perhaps most poignantly in Dixie’s video work, with its sounds of inhalation and expiration, its use of umngqokolo throat singing by women in the Eastern Cape, its beeping and sighing ventilator, is an acute awareness of the frailty of the planet and the tenuousness of our place in it. Things are turned upside down, to be sure, and this body of work is a site of mourning, death and, in its most optimistic moments, regeneration. Perhaps the most haunting motif in Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things, is the arrival, traversal and departure of the car in the video. The depiction of twin headlights lighting up the dark, approaching as though home is being reached, is a gesture that is almost unbearably poetically wistful. The lights suggest a way through, an arrival, but also perpetual departure and loss.”
