ART-PRESENTATION: Carey Young-The New Architecture
Carey Young’s work explores the increasing commodification of dissent. She works across a variety of physical and electronic media, including video, photography and text, as well as using found objects, procedures and processes from the business sphere. She has become recognised for her works across a variety of media which investigate the increasing incorporation of the personal and public domains into the realm of the commercial.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Dallas Museum of Art
In her solo exhibition “The New Architecture” at the Dallas Museum of Art, Carey Young presents the world debut of her new video work “Palais de Justice” (2017), together with a selection of new and existing photographic and text-based works. “It’s for You” (2009) is a large black wall text across the entrance to the gallery areas for Young’s exhibition: “friendly, honest, straightforward, refreshing, dynamic.” Young appropriated a corporate statement of “brand values” from a major international telecom corporation. “Palais de Justice” was filmed at the Palais de Justice in Brussels, a 19th Century courthouse designed to depict law in terms of the sublime. Contradicting the familiar patriarchal culture of law, Young’s camera portrays female judges and lawyers at court. The work subtly builds a counter-narrative: a legal system seemingly centered on, women, as if male presence may be optional or unnecessary in this particular future. Young’s camera becomes implicated, either caught within reflections, or through becoming noticed by some of her subjects. “Palais de Justice” considers the complex relations between lenses, surveillance and ideas of framing or being framed, which are at the core of the law-related work Young has been developing for more than a decade. “Black Square (Cell)” (2016) is a photographic work in which we see a small square window in a prison door, through which we can make out the inky darkness of a prison cell. The work offers an intentionally ambiguous reflection on the relations between creativity and confinement, or art and institution, as well as ideas of borders and thresholds on to the unknowable or unthinkable. “Obsidian Contract” (2010) features a legal contract written backwards and reflected in a black mirror. The contract, written to involve the viewer, proposes the exhibition space visible in the mirror as a new area of publicly-owned land, in which certain activities considered illegal in public space at different times, such as the grazing of animals or sexual activity, are made permissible. “Body Techniques” (2007) is a series of eight photographs that consider the relationships between art and globalized commerce. Set in the vast building sites of Dubai’s and Sharjah’s futuristic corporate landscape, we see Carey Young alone and dressed in a suit, her actions reworking some of the classic performance-based works associated with conceptual art, including works by Richard Long, Dennis Oppenheim and Valie Export. The artist appears as one tiny individual, overwhelmed, dislocated from, or even belittled by the corporate surroundings, while dressed up to play a role within them.
Info: Curator: Gavin Delahunty, Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood, Dallas, Duration: 2/2-2/4/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.dma.org
