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October 12th, 2017 — November 12th, 2017
Denny Gallery is pleased to present Permanent Spectacle, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the artist duo Future Retrieval. Ceramicists who draw on a variety of processes, media, and technologies to create highly detailed work, Guy Michael Davis and Katie Parker have developed a practice that mines the past to reimagine historical events and landscapes to make them resonate in the present day.
Permanent Spectacle is the culmination of a yearlong research project that Davis and Parker undertook at the Smithsonian archives at the National Museum of Natural History and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum respectively. Using the material they gathered through their research, they created a constructed landscape that references idealized environments filled with wildlife, set against scenic, block printed wallpaper recreated through hand cut paper. The resulting tableau is an elaborate and intricate modern-day period room, a fantastical world filled with artifacts, which re-examines the way decorative objects are typically presented.
The work takes the shape of a curved, cycloramic display that mimics a diorama that one might find at a natural history museum. The hand cut landscape wallpaper, based on patterning from the 1800s, has been altered to erase any trace of human presence. Displayed on pedestals in front of and around the backdrop are porcelain wildlife specimens culled from the Smithsonian’s collection from notable U.S. exploring expeditions and surveys.