Diasporic Entropic Diremption and the Cross-Cultural Cross

About

The exhibition, Diasporic Entropic Diremption (D.E.D.) and the Cross-Cultural Cross is a focused yet wide-ranging exhibition that spans both traditional and contemporary African continental and diasporic art production within the rubric of Americana and the modern tack toward liberation movements. It brings together an emerging artist, an outsider artist, a photographer, a sculptor, a scholar, a collector, an ancestor, and a curator.

Exploiting the gallery’s high ceilings, the exhibition will take surprising form by adding a second floor to Cathouse Proper’s main gallery space at 524 Projects. Some works that have been exhibited by the program before will reappear in this new exhibition context, including photographer Renée Cox’s monumental 1993 diptych, Origin; sculptor Nari Ward’s drilled American history book, Hole Nation; and ancestor Ellwood C. Dixon’s handcrafted model of Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria. Other works have been recently created, specifically emerging artist Frank Frances’s paintings of flags and cotton, as well as photographs recontextualized from his professional shoots for high-end home decor magazines. Collector Al Bolton, who buys art directly from sources in Burkina Faso, loans several traditional Kota reliquary objects, and scholar Cécile Fromont, whose published research has helped inform this exhibition, provides an original rendering based on archeological material that conflates the Kongo and Christian crosses. Fromont also contributes an animation that demonstrates the dialectical visual relationship of cross and lozenge. Unifying this diverse installation of works, outsider artist Daniel Swanigan Snow has been commissioned to assist in the overall exhibition design, while curator David Dixon shows a few works of his own that lend insight into the conception and form of the exhibition itself.