Erin Dunn
14 Mar - 12 Apr 2009
ERIN DUNN
"Distinguished by the Swans"
14 March - 12 April
Opening 13 March 9 p.m.
In the world of Erin Dunn, everything is visible simultaneously, from building block to image and all the stages in between. In a mesmeric riot of colour and detail, her work unfolds before your eyes. Using pastels and oil paint, airbrush techniques and holographic stickers, feathers and flowers, burning candles and impossibly dark crimson strawberries, fresh and wilted parrot tulips and a Dutch windmill fashioned from coloured pipe cleaners, Dunn conjures up a cosmos that is Romantic in the true sense of the word. Ironic and precise and with a partly affected, partly sincere, respect for nature. With their singular use of colour and penchant for ornamental choreography, Echoes of Philip Otto Runge and Matthew Barney are as close as 'The Mole '* and the first Disney films such as Fantasia and Bambi (take a look at the amazing rain sequence in Bambi (the original version, of course) to see how the makers became engrossed, minutes-long, in simulating natural phenomenon).
The early interest in natural sciences that characterized the original German Romantics also surfaces in Dunn 's work. DNA double helixes add a festoon of red and white to the picture plane. An owl formed from a loose cloud of feathers imitates a school of glimmering fish that meld into a single wash of movement. A tiny butterfly 's wing movements are so mimicked with such precision you feel you 're watching a natural history film. In Dunn 's work, the popular cliché that applauds the analogy between atom systems and galaxies is the subject of highly personal research. That each of the elements exhibits a dynamic of its own, on its own scale, lends her work an enormous richness. Silver lozenges that come together to form ice crystals dance in ever-changing shapes and patterns over the image before becoming frozen into the ice landscape where black and white swans whirl in a last pirouette before rising like upside-down snowflakes into the heavens.
Until recently, Dunn composed and played her own film soundtracks - shrill synthesizer scores that gave her work a rather harsh undertone. The desolate atmosphere and the tedium that is somehow audible summons up the mood an American teenage girl 's bedroom despite Dunn 's refined visual language. In her latest films, produced during a work period in artist 's workplace Kausa Australis, Rotterdam, the soundtrack consists of Dunn humming and whistling.
Dunn's solo exhibition in W139 presents a selection of her drawings and films produced over the last five years. The backdrops and figures used in the animations will also be on display. A new, short film will be filmed on location during the exhibition. It will be a stop-motion ballet animation based on photos of young dancers against scenery built especially for the film in W139 and which will be screened during "Distinguished by the Swans".
*"The Mole" Czech children 's cartoons.
Henni van Beek
"Distinguished by the Swans"
14 March - 12 April
Opening 13 March 9 p.m.
In the world of Erin Dunn, everything is visible simultaneously, from building block to image and all the stages in between. In a mesmeric riot of colour and detail, her work unfolds before your eyes. Using pastels and oil paint, airbrush techniques and holographic stickers, feathers and flowers, burning candles and impossibly dark crimson strawberries, fresh and wilted parrot tulips and a Dutch windmill fashioned from coloured pipe cleaners, Dunn conjures up a cosmos that is Romantic in the true sense of the word. Ironic and precise and with a partly affected, partly sincere, respect for nature. With their singular use of colour and penchant for ornamental choreography, Echoes of Philip Otto Runge and Matthew Barney are as close as 'The Mole '* and the first Disney films such as Fantasia and Bambi (take a look at the amazing rain sequence in Bambi (the original version, of course) to see how the makers became engrossed, minutes-long, in simulating natural phenomenon).
The early interest in natural sciences that characterized the original German Romantics also surfaces in Dunn 's work. DNA double helixes add a festoon of red and white to the picture plane. An owl formed from a loose cloud of feathers imitates a school of glimmering fish that meld into a single wash of movement. A tiny butterfly 's wing movements are so mimicked with such precision you feel you 're watching a natural history film. In Dunn 's work, the popular cliché that applauds the analogy between atom systems and galaxies is the subject of highly personal research. That each of the elements exhibits a dynamic of its own, on its own scale, lends her work an enormous richness. Silver lozenges that come together to form ice crystals dance in ever-changing shapes and patterns over the image before becoming frozen into the ice landscape where black and white swans whirl in a last pirouette before rising like upside-down snowflakes into the heavens.
Until recently, Dunn composed and played her own film soundtracks - shrill synthesizer scores that gave her work a rather harsh undertone. The desolate atmosphere and the tedium that is somehow audible summons up the mood an American teenage girl 's bedroom despite Dunn 's refined visual language. In her latest films, produced during a work period in artist 's workplace Kausa Australis, Rotterdam, the soundtrack consists of Dunn humming and whistling.
Dunn's solo exhibition in W139 presents a selection of her drawings and films produced over the last five years. The backdrops and figures used in the animations will also be on display. A new, short film will be filmed on location during the exhibition. It will be a stop-motion ballet animation based on photos of young dancers against scenery built especially for the film in W139 and which will be screened during "Distinguished by the Swans".
*"The Mole" Czech children 's cartoons.
Henni van Beek