CHARLES P. REAY: Strats / DADADADA / Complications
DANIEL RAEDEKE: Naturebook
Project Room
YVONNE OSEI: Africa Clothe Me Bare
Media Arts Room
June 3 – July 9, 2016
Opening Reception: Friday, June 3, 2016 6 to 9 pm
Bruno David Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Charles P. Reay. Chip Reay presents a new installation titled “Strats, DADADADA and Complications.”
A plurality of conjectures, “Strats, DADADADA and Complications” summarizes several small groups of works produced, primarily in simple collage form, over the last two years. Strats riffs on the influence that the forms of Fender’s electrical Telecasters and Evangelons might have had on the guitar works of Picasso and Braque. DADADADA: exemplifications of the Dadaistes while oblique references illuminate a cacophony. Should DADA be heard and not seen? Should art be seen and not heard? Should DADA be? Should DADA!?! DADADADA! Complications: a collection of modest impressions that grow increasingly complex. In a horological sense, by adding complications they have moved beyond the simple display of minutes and hours to become more elaborate and grander. While sharing a common genesis, their evolution reflects a fuller picture of time. When in Rome all roads lead elsewhere. Charles P. Reay lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery Publications will publish a catalogue of the artist’s work with an exhibition history and bibliography.
In the Project Room, the gallery presents new paintings by Daniel Raedeke. Naturebook, offers a handmade, acoustic, compliment to his often digitally inspired artistic output. The paintings explore the saturated world of images from nature publications Raedeke enjoyed as a child. In previous work, Raedeke has developed layered surface effects as backgrounds and skins on invented forms. In Naturebook, Raedeke concentrates the work into an investigation of the layered background. Although expressive and handmade, the works in Naturebook recall a digital past as if archived jpegs of nature photos have broken down over time and are repackaged as color and texture samples. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery Publications will publish a catalogue of the artist’s work with an exhibition history and bibliography.
In the Media Arts Room, the gallery presents a video work by German-born Ghanaian artist Yvonne Osei. Yvonne Osei most recent work, entitled Africa Clothe Me Bare, is an ongoing series of performances, characterized by redefining outdoor nude female sculptures in Western countries. The art is birthed not through a product but through the process of dressing and undressing nude female monuments often erected to commemorate buildings, decorate architectural façades and become mere extensions of water fountains and museum fronts. The series explores ideas of nudity and nakedness both literally and metaphorically as old monuments of “nude” female sculptures are seen anew as “naked” female bodies. The work exposes an inherent exploitation of female bodies as objects of possession, while the act of clothing and unclothing transforms their status from mere objects of viewing pleasure to subjects of a heightened humanness. The cloths present residues of colonialism as they are plagiarized, mass-produced products, purchased in Western fabric shops and problematically labeled as African affiliated in order to gain global market value. These labels generated through Western lenses perpetuate stereotypes while generalizing and bastardizing a wide range of African cultural norms and traditions. Africa Clothe Me Bare also reverses expectations of the relationship between the parental colonial power and the infantilized colonial subject, as the Ghanaian artist publicly cloths Western sculptures in various African clothing styles. The performances reveal evidential and temporal indications of issues associated with colonialism and gender inequality still prevalent in our hypocritically “post-colonial” and “equal world”.
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Saturday 10 am – 5 pm & by appointment.
Bruno David Gallery
3721 Washington Blvd.
Saint Louis, MO 63108
1.314.531.3030
