Part 2 of The Public Secret curated by David Gibson at The Dino Eli Gallery

Amanda Browder

Megan Hays

Rachel Dwan

Amanda Browder

Guests at the opening

 These days there are no more secrets. Everyone announces everything that’s on their mind, whether on a Facebook status, a Tweet, or an IM. The very texture of our lives has become the basis for both communication and entertainment, and art is left waiting its turn in line. Any form of organized artifice is immediately suspect, like TV shows, media coverage of political and social events, and even the humble novel. 

Yet even as we seek to expose ourselves, we do so in a fashion that is revelatory of can never be public, and it takes an artifice born in secret to express this. 

The artist traffics in versions of truth, such as an image that is presented or an object dramatizing an action, or a gesture that creates a design or image that in turn suggests another image or design. The gesture or object are both culturally important, but their symbolic repercussions are idiosyncratically poignant in different ways to different people. 

So the secret becomes more than a mystery, it becomes a clue to its own answer. What are the questions here, and how do we address them?

Rachel Dwan

for me, all thinking takes place out in the world. anything i do in my head is first mapped onto real world interactions. math, which is so often described as abstract, non-physical, is for me is a matter of chunking clearly and then rearranging, stretching and squishing, etc.

similarly, these works are mental teasers that ask for simplification. an impossible amount of information is given, organized along two avenues of mental mapping. the first is the network, which comes from the initial drawing, an intuitive line system with clumps and interchanges. networks are hierarchical systems in which nodes that receive more traffic are more relevant than those at the outskirts. the second structural system is the grid, which equalizes all input in an evenly spaced field: no box of the grid is more important than any other. in these works, the grid is created with a paint roller, which picks up aspects of the initial lines and repeats them over the initial drawing, distorting and recombining them.

with this combination of information systems, the viewer is given a kind of primordial soup of line segments and orientations and suggestive ink blots which seem to start to be coming together to form something. for me, the playful process of associating, comparing, and chunking i do with these is a visual representation of what happens to me when i sit back and consider an event, or a problem that i need to solve. how, in an even field of information, can i start to differentiate, to group, and to call it clearly one way or the other? how open/closed do i want to leave it?

http://racheldwan.com/

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