Michael Kvium, Christian Lemmerz. The Wake, operates like a dream in progress, a series of filmic representations of states lifted from sleep-drugged readings of James Joyce. As Sigmuend Freud translated dreams into language, so Kvium and Lemmerz reverse it: To translate Joyce's dream language back into images, for these to become another dreaming towards new images and image constructions.
DCA Gallery is pleased to present the Danish artists Michael Kvium and Christian Lemmerz, for their exhibition of the video installation, The Wake.
The Wake, operates like a dream in progress, a series of filmic representations of states lifted from sleep-drugged
readings of James Joyce. As Sigmuend Freud translated dreams into language, so Kvium and Lemmerz reverse it: To
translate Joyce's dream language back into images, for these to become another dreaming towards new images and
image constructions. They have imagined film as a tapestry and a feverish dream, a film wanting to invent its own
images, its own grammar, and its own world. The two artists have taken up the thread from Joyce and let the film
grow out of the queer undercurrrents of the book. Litterally, they have dreamed on upon the close woven carpet of
deconstructed language in Joyce's novel.
This film, in the same manner as Joyce's book, contains everything, hazards everything, and tends toward dissolving
everything. A film which in its ambition spans from absolute underexposure to absolute overexposure, from black to
white to full color, from emptiness to pictorial noise nullifying any meaning. And a film that apart from its multitude of
cinematographic experiments draws elements from literature, the visual arts, and performance art onto the arena of
the moving pictures in an effort to emancipate the medium from Hollywood and the Tyranny of the traditional linear
narrative.
The Wake has been shown amongst other places: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen 2000; World Wide
Video Festival, Arti et Amicitiea, Amsterdam 2000; Kampnagel, Hamburg 2000; Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo 2000;
Bienal de Arte de la Habana, La Habana 2000; and Museo National de Bellas Artes, Bienal de Arte de, Buenos
Aires 2000.
Michael Kvium and Christian Lemmerz are a painter and a sculptor respectively. Since the early eighties, they have,
along with their primary activities, alone or together, also explored other ways of expression, such as film, video,
performance, and theatre.
For further information please contact Miles Manning at 212.255.5511
DCA Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York