Opening Reception - PARK // Derek Dunlop

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Derek Dunlop, "Study for Garden," 2016

digital print

Opening Reception*: Friday May 4th, 5-8 pm*artist will be in attendance

Artist talk*: Saturday May 5th, 3 pm*ASL interpretation made available by request

All events are free and open to the public

“For groups constituted by historical injury, the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it. Sometimes it seems it would be better to move on - to let, as Marx wrote, the dead bury the dead. But it is the damaging aspects of the past that tend to stay with us, and the desire to forget may itself be a symptom of haunting…” and she concludes, “…The dead can bury the dead all day long and still not be done.” Heather Love from her book, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

PARK includes work created after a multi-year engagement with various regions in North America — all cruising sites where men have historically met each other away from the prohibitions of society. The exhibition includes a floor sculpture, a series of monoprints, and several digital prints. PARK is part of an ongoing series of works that engage with how natural spaces, queer behaviours, and capitalism are all entangled in a continual state of becoming. All the work in the show speaks to the condition of constant change — of growth, decay and mutation.

Artist Statement:

I have a studio-based, theoretically engaged practice that considers the history of art. For the past several years, my research has been concerned with claiming an artistic tradition of queer abstraction which emerged out of the second half of the twentieth century. This tradition was created as a means for artists to negotiate a complicated subjectivity through coded expression. My desire to claim this tradition is nuanced and evolves from my own experience of living within an unresolved political moment.

Avery Gordon’s theory of haunting is very important to me because it has given me the ability to describe some of the characteristics of this impasse. She uses the term haunting to describe a condition, “…in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known…” She notes that “…the term haunting [can] describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done comes alive…” Moreover, she describes how hauntings alter one’s experience of linear time: “…disturbed feelings won’t go away…the present seamlessly becoming ‘the future’ gets entirely jammed up.”

My work considers the way in which the history of queer people continually haunts the present. What does it mean to be haunted by queer spectres? Through this lens, I have developed several bodies of work that have explored abstraction within the contemporary field.(full statement can be found on our website closer to the exhibition)

Derek Dunlop is an artist, writer and curator whose research focuses on the history of abstraction as it relates to theories of identity and the process of subject formation. He is particularly interested in questions dealing with form and materiality in the mediums of painting, drawing, and printmaking. He has participated in numerous residencies and programs including the inaugural Open Sessions program at The Drawing Center in New York City; the thematic residency, Are We Looking at Dead Birds? at the Banff Centre; as well as the studio artist residency program at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, Dunlop’s work has been exhibited in art galleries throughout North America including the UCLA New Wight Gallery in Los Angeles, Artspeak in Vancouver, and the Drawing Center in New York City. He completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia and is pursuing his PhD in Art history at the University of Toronto.

The artist would like to thank the Manitoba Arts Council for their support.