DAWN DeDEAUX

Since the 1970s Dawn DeDeaux’s work has spanned video, performance, photography, and installation creating art that is visionary.
Initially, her work traversed the race and class divides she witnessed amidst the inequalities that defined her early life in New Orleans and the national discontent she observed
in the gaze of television throughout the turbulent 1960s of wars, riots and assassinations.

 Themes in her work over the past decades have followed a trajectory from these emerging social issues to a later focus on ecological injustice from a global and planetary perspective. Through it all she has aimed to connect the macro complexities of life’s sustainability to the micro struggles of the street - exploring global scenarios of pandemic and ecological degradation that would reshape human life and specific cultures throughout the world.

In RETROSPECTIVE

Dawn grew up on Esplanade Avenue just down the street from the New Orleans Museum of Art which she frequented often as a child. Now this same museum will honor DeDeaux with a career retrospective spanning five decades of her work in an exhibition titled The Space Between Worlds opening in September, 2020.  While DeDeaux first studied painting for eight years, she soon understood that her path was to push the art from canvas into the streets and onto the screen. Her retrospective will follow this movement and unfold across a series of immersive installations that showcase her videos, sculptures, photographs, installations, and assemblage art recreated from the 1970s to the present. 

DeDeaux’s voice is vitally important as we consider local and global conversations about social and environment justice, and other urgent contemporary challenges. Emerging from a family tragedy in her formative years, DeDeaux shares “as a recipient of the greatest circumstantial gift of empathy, you understand that you are part of a collective human family. Empathy illuminated the frailty and vulnerability of people and place.  It also set my focus on the big picture, and how intertwined we are with one another, spinning together like a galaxy of stars with all other planetary life systems in a most unlikely, tenuous way. This comprehension of our totality and impermanence steers all of my work.”

DeDeaux has been at the forefront of envisioning a post-anthropocene world as part of her decade-long MotherShip series — with components recently on view at MassMoCA, and her Space Clowns series featured in the fall 2020 issue of Aperture Magazine. Her work has long anticipated scenarios such as the current pandemic, and the growing impact of environmental conditions on planetary habitats, including survivor suits and gear.

International Curator Dan Cameron has often worked
with Dawn DeDeaux, including her previous installations in Texas at Ballroom Marfa, in New Orleans for Prospect.2, and recently in Kansas City as part of the international arts venue Open Spaces. “As curator in three collaborations with DeDeaux, it was a singular experience each time, not least of all because it enabled me to place myself in the position of the ideal audience member, who also gets to run backstage and witness how the magic is spun.”

“DeDeaux’s skill and facility in employing a matchless range of techniques and formats is almost without comparison, particularly in an artist of her generation.
At the risk of overstating the singularity of her approach, the sheer volume of handmade objects, images, light, sounds and moods that she orchestrated in tying together the divergent parts resulted in a number of exemplary finished works that didn’t make the final cut, as there was simply not enough room to install them. With DeDeaux, abundance is never simply a matter of having too much of
a good thing, but of exploring and developing every possible permutation of a leitmotif, then engaging in multiple arrangements and edits until the final, composite image slowly settles into a crisp perfection.”

In his essay Centuries, Not Seasons: Recent Work by Dawn DeDeaux, poet and critic Roberto Tejada engages in an exchange with DeDeaux’s 2005 essay written for Art in America immediately following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Tejada illuminates the shadow of disaster cast upon her work, insisting “Her rubble of cultural artifacts, in the long duration of geological time, are to be measured in what she calls ‘centuries, not seasons.” She excites spaces in which to wonder whether alternate formations and transformations of matter are possible. In her recent work, DeDeaux ironizes with design elements drawn from the human sciences to enable a view into cultural forms of a system so in decline as to be already alien to itself. She prompts us to interrogate what present conditions are necessary to act in reply to what she calls the ‘terrifying and extraordinary’ evidence of existence; and to preempt the immanent ‘sudden cessation of life.’