10/26/2024
Mark Dion - The Naturalists - AP 1/5, 2023 - screen print, dowels, and screen printed label - 27 x 23½ x 1 in.
68.58 x 59.69 x 2.54 cm - 31 x 23½ x 1 in. (framed) 78.74 x 59.69 x 2.54 cm (framed)
“Extractivism is one leitmotif in Dion’s practice. It is a logical outcropping of his decades-spanning investigation into the history of science, and the systems of knowledge which continuously renew the popular conviction that these disciplines unveil objective, universal truths and necessities. Capital, too, has always “followed the science,” so long as it bolstered the bottom line. Such tensions are at play in Dion’s recent drawings, two of which are on view in the gallery’s back room. Each subjects a schematized life form to a thicket of textual labeling: a tree in one, and a whale in the other. Taken together, the labels undermine the rationality that their form purports. They intermix resources, products, and various man-made atrocities.
The exhibition’s title comes from a line in William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” a poem penned by the English proto-ecologist around 1803. Blake, too, was concerned with atrocities, and in “Auguries” he begins by listing man’s injustices against animals, before those committed upon other humans. Throughout, Blake asserts the interconnection of all small things to all grand things: “A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate / Predicts the ruin of the State. / A Horse misus’d upon the Road / Calls to Heaven for Human blood.” An attack against one is an attack against all.“ - Exhibition text by Nick Irvin. Full text link in bio.
Mark Dion – All Heaven in a Rage
September 19th – November 3rd, 2024
Reception: September 19th, 2024, 6-9 pm
No Gallery – 105 Henry St. #4 NYC NY 10002
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