Annabel Daou: Only If

About

signs and symbols is pleased to present Only If, Annabel Daou's second solo exhibition at the gallery, exploring themes relating to nature, history, personal experience and collective belonging. Daou’s language-oriented work draws from the words that saturate ordinary life. The word “only,” here, registers the intractable desire to claim individual experience and to hold steadfast in the moment to one or another oscillating position taken in relation to others or to ourselves.

In addition to a new video and a series of works on microfiber paper, Only If will also feature the debut of Daou’s most recent participatory performance work on Saturday, December 10th at the gallery.

Several works in the exhibition generate meaning through their relationships to one another. In a series of six uniformly scaled works, the language is cut and peeled away from the surface. Each phrase appears balanced on a precipice—on the verge of taking on meaning or being scattered into the aftermath of speech. Taken together, these works reflect on binaries and their undoing. Oppositional terms (me/you, us/them) give way to invocations of synchronicity (here/now), repetition (once/twice), contingency (if/when) and, finally, mortality (flesh/blood).

A similarly subtle deconstruction of binaries is at play in a pair of works produced through a labor-intensive process of cutting away negative space to reveal language. In the first, a clash of conflicting personal histories is implied by the phrases “only my war,” “only your war.” In a larger work, difference and opposition are swept away by a single phrase: “only one story.”

The surfaces of these works are created through a dyeing process that involves both manipulation and chance. As the light changes, the colors and textures shift; they can appear unexpectedly vivid or evoke the chalkiness of a dry shell. Daou has long been interested in the way repetitious markings, made by anonymous labor, are often all that remains of past times and places. Her works can be thought of both as made objects and the residue of a performative practice rooted in the ritual of repetition. Suspended off the wall, the works cast shadows that indicate movement and ephemerality. The words dissolve into pattern and outline, as meaning and the attempt to capture it gives way to a rhythmic terrain of language.  

In a work titled cat’s cradle, cat’s game, words appear suspended in a void. The work suggests our caughtness between the sway of regret (“if only…”) and possibility (“only if…”), or the competing influences of popular discourses. In each case, we are caught in a game that cannot be won.

In Dog Days, a short video recorded by the artist on a summer day serves as the backdrop for a meditation on correspondences between past and present ways of living. References to child’s play in the weeds and the rubble of history are interwoven with reflections on personal loss and the cosmos. The video’s title references the hottest period of summer and the heliacal rising of the binary star Sirius (also known as the Dog Star), which has been taken as portentous across history and cultures. As in preceding video works by Daou, Dog Days features the body of the artist moving in slow motion, along with visuals and a soundscape suggesting the dilation of time that can occur in moments of crisis and forbearance. Whereas in previous videos Daou has used the voices of strangers, alongside her own voice, in order to reflect explicitly on broader social conditions, in Dog Days language is there only to be read silently, and much of the work’s narrative is uncharacteristically personal. Nevertheless, in the concluding image of dandelion seeds blowing in the breeze, Daou suggests the possibility for cross-pollination, solidarity and survival.      

annabel daou’s work takes place at the intersection of writing, speech and non-verbal modes of communication. Her paper-based constructions, audio/video works and performances explore the expressive possibilities of ordinary language and reveal intimacies between individual and collective experience. Frequently, her works evoke moments of rupture, chaos, instability and misunderstanding but always with the tenuous possibility of repair. Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. Her work has been shown at The National Museum of Beirut; The Park Avenue Armory, New York; KW, Berlin; The Drawing Room, London; and The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Public collections include Baltimore Museum of Art; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; and The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. In 2019-20, Daou was a Pollock-Krasner resident at ISCP. Recent solo exhibitions include DECLARATION at Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Global Spotlight: Annabel Daou at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (formerly Arlington Arts Center), Gods and Grifters at Conduit Gallery in Dallas and Searching... at DG Kunstraum in Munich.