Dave Hullfish Bailey at Malmö Konsthall
Artist: Dave Hullfish Bailey
Venue: Malmö Konsthall
Exhibition Title: Broken Country
Date: February 16 – April 7, 2013
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Malmö Konsthall
Press Release:
In Dave Hullfish Bailey’s complex installations he incorporates everything from photography, film, words, sand, grass and grain to drawings and ready-made objects. A turning point in his practice is architecture, especially modernist architecture, and alternative ways of using and creating utopian living structures. In his works Bailey often poses questions about the relation between natural and societal structures. Language and histories are emancipated and new potential social realignments are suggested. Narratives are joined together, expanded and condensed through non-linear systems, diagrams, complex webs, patterns and trains of chain reactions, reflecting the way in which it is impossible to form a singular or fixed viewpoint when social, political and cultural spheres, as well as language, facts and fictions are so inextricably connected.
For the project at Malmö Konsthall Bailey presents ongoing research from southern Colorado’s Eastern Plain’s, an ecologically complex region that provided the context for diverse models of community organization throughout successive waves of modernization. The failures of these experiments set the stage for the countercultural occupation of the lands, most infamously by the alternative community of ‘Drop City’, a melting pot for artists, musicians, thinkers and architects. Formed in 1965 and abandoned in the early 1970s, Drop City was one of the frontline outposts in what the Whole Earth Catalog* referred to as the ‘Outlaw Area’. Bailey looks for points of material and cultural porosity between the separatist impulse, and the concrete geographic and historical contexts of utopian experiments. Extending this concern into the present, an abandoned public school across the road from the Drop City site anchors Bailey’s more speculative investigation of experimental pedagogy rooted in the interplay of topography, climate, writing and media.