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Comment by NEWS PORTFOLIOS*NET on September 6, 2013 at 1:15pm

Dennis Balk: Defaced Fruit with American Indians

Artist's Statement

This is the third, solo exhibition of my work in Bangkok.

This exhibition takes place during this awkward time of pronounced counter strategies. A time when primary motives are replaced by uncomfortable adjustments. The Post-Arab /Post Spring reflects the neo-retro Occupy Movements, and within the gallery networks the para-fictions in Hyperrelational Aesthetics reflect the collapse of the neoliberal economies which allow and actively entertain a variety of civil intolerance now seen as the necessary failures we require to move us all closer to a world of corrected insights and modified and down-scaled goal seeking.

Here in this Gallery, 338 OIDA, I've tried to create a situation where INsignificant components of our shared contemporary moment are brought together to serve as a further canceling out or fashionable defacement of status quo or supermarket aesthetics. This canceling out process is still the optimum process of the still-lingering avant gardists’ activity. I am interested in the ways we all maintain the roles of protagonists and antagonists as shadows of earlier twentieth century, anti-fascist sentiments continue to animate our trending vernaculars. All of this against the shifting backdrop of pronounced, iconographic migration brought on by the continuing diasporas of western, democratic idealism. I wonder if our access to clarity is enhanced or further challenged in such an oversaturated, over stimulated environment?

We have expectations of the work of art—it previously illuminated the sublime achievements and failures of the human condition. The question is, can art continue to assist in deciphering the contemporary moment?

-Dennis Balk, Bangkok 2013

Dennis Balk is an educator, visual artist, writer and playwright active since the late 1980s. He is Chairperson of the Computer Graphics/ Multimedia Department at Bangkok University International. Balk has lectured and taught in the Arabian Gulf, at Universit? IUAV di Venezia, Yale University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Balk exhibits widely, including a survey at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2009). Publications include particles + waves with plausibility (2006), Colin de Land, American Fine Arts (2008) and Dennis Balk/1890-2090 (2010).

The exhibition is on view from 6 September -31 October 2013.

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