Transcending the Walls of the Museum: Dawn DeDeaux’s Philosophy of Space

by Jenelle Davis, ARTVOICES

Prolific, astute, engaging and very New Orleanian, Dawn DeDeaux has established herself as a formidable presence in the art world both locally and further afield. DeDeaux’s seminal body of work has resulted in her frequent recognition as a forerunner of new media, to the extent of earning her textbook fame and countless accolades recorded in tomes of critical writing and broadcast on TV.

Although trained as a painter, DeDeaux broke away from the norm and acted on her attraction to conceptual art. “I’ve always been interested in multi-sensory work. It’s extraordinary to combine all the senses.” DeDeaux works with a sophisticated creative philosophy. “I have a longtime interest and enthusiasm to produce Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art’ utilizing interdisciplinary art applications.” To this end, DeDeaux’s installations combine multiple media including video, sound, light and text embedded in physical and tangible objects that challenge the senses and pique one’s brain. Aesthetics are not relegated in place of philosophy or intellect in her work, resulting in a truly beguiling experience.

Wetland - Daytime, 2008

Early in her career, DeDeaux worked as the “communications artist” for the New Orleans Museum of Art. The mid 70s was a period when the museum was trying to change its image while looking for ways to expand its membership. While there she started and acted as the editor of Arts Quarterly magazine and produced a radio program called Art Now which, as DeDeaux explains, is now sadly defunct. Perhaps one of the most pivotal results of her tenure at NOMA was her fabulous Feast of Panthers in 1982, a large-scale dinner organized to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s visit to New Orleans. This was one of DeDeaux’s many conceptual feasts, including her involvement in KKProjects recent dinner party on November 1st, 2008. These are most certainly reflective of her devotion to a multi-sensory and unconventional approach to art—as she remarks, “taste is not to be overlooked.

The 1980s were an inspiring time for the arts in New Orleans, particularly in the Marigny/Bywater neighborhoods, recounts DeDeaux. “The late 80s had places like The Pearl … Quintron was around … and Temperance Hall was, and still is, a venue for theater.” She contends that “this was the very early stages of the visual arts renaissance for New Orleans; it was a fantastic thing to watch develop.” DeDeaux adds that New Orleans had its musical renaissance, as did its literature, but the 80s “was the time for the arts” and that renaissance didn’t stop there.

Born and raised in New Orleans, as DeDeaux jovially remarks, “poor but in a big house”, her work has historically been refreshingly less NOLA referential than some of her compatriots’ work. That is, of course, until that fateful, catastrophic event in 2005. “I deal with my Katrina experience by giving myself a license to work in a purely abstract manner” explains DeDeaux, “I was very moved by the annihilation.” DeDeaux left the night before it hit and headed to the Mississippi Gulf Coast with a handful of car-less neighbors in tow. “New Orleans was a dead city but it still had the look of a city. Where I was, it was Hiroshima.”

She soon discovered something “philosophical and Zen” about cathartic artistic production after devastation. “Walking through Katrina’s devastation, I have no doubt that abstract art is the offspring of world wars and holocausts. Minimalism is there, too, naturalistic in the face of annihilation.”

In one of her post-K creations, DeDeaux used shards of glass on backlit tables to create ephemeral, hurricane-like swirls—“I wasn’t intending to do Hurricane Suite, the broken glass morphed into that.” For her it’s not the hurricane imagery that’s important, it’s the process that contains substance. “It’s like working with wind, water, air and atmosphere; it brought me back to the cycles of life at the barest level.”

Although alluding to the devastation was not DeDeaux’s original intention for her biennial project, she quickly discovered that a third of the artists for Prospect.1 did Katrina-related work. “I thought that if international artists are representing Katrina, then at least the local artists should too.”

Two main projects that DeDeaux has been working on for the biennial are Steps, actual illuminated steps strategically placed in various locations around the city and Swan Song, a multi-faceted work for KK Projects.

In what proved to be a hefty feat, DeDeaux found that she needed to shore the building that would serve as her gallery before it was even possible to begin work on such a destitute and misshapen home. However, a strong undertow pulled at her thoughts as she was working on securing the house. “I thought of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and the blues singer King’s Bury me in a cypress shore” because of the gaping holes in the floors of the space, visually lending themselves to her as a perfect final resting place. “What also occurred to me was the thought of a domestic narrative. I was thinking about the people who used to live there and imagining what their lives were like.” DeDeaux continues, “I became sentimental. I thought, this might be the last exhibit before the building is torn down so [a homage to all the former residents] would be a fitting exhibit.”

So that is what she did and with very poignant results.

The first room in the house on North Villere is consumed by Dirge for Journey, a piece that had been previously exhibited in Houston to acclaim. “The boat is fitted with parts of New Orleans culture that can’t be replicated. The city can rebuild,” maintains DeDeaux, but there are parts of culture that can’t be fabricated. “There is still loss.”

To the chagrin of many, the mud-covered boat had been pillaged of its varied contents, mainly instruments, while on display in the house. Unfortunately, this occurrence prevented DeDeaux and Terrence Blanchard from collaborating further on the piece. They had intended to synchronize his Funeral Dirge to the specific instruments on the vessel. Eventually, she would like to fill it up with water and send it out on its final journey, reminiscent of a Viking on his final journal to Valhalla.

After this first room, viewers are led into the next room titled Curtain Call. The third is Final Act and lastly is the house’s hallway, aptly coined Passage, which is intended to convey a sense of regeneration and cycles. These titles are reflective of DeDeaux’s conception of the house as acts in an opera, as they are also more deeply embedded in the “paradox and juxtaposition between life and death.”

As DeDeaux’s interests lie in “transcending the walls of the museum,” parts of her inviting public piece, Steps, can be found in a few places around the city, most visibly in City Park. “After Katrina I noticed that people weren’t sitting out on their steps anymore, there were only barren steps left,” remembers DeDeaux. Her perceptive reaction to this was to create “small lighthouses that are guiding the way back home,” both figuratively and literally. What’s more is that these “beacons of light” are also very user friendly. “They float,” says DeDeaux, “people can use them as rafts for the next Katrina.” She hopes that this project will result in at least 30 of these steps being placed around the city and eventually relocated to form an illuminated amphitheater of steps in City Park.

Even with all of her disaster related pieces, DeDeaux admits that “we are fatigued from references about the Katrina experience.” Nevertheless, she contends that it has “brought out the best in us. If we look back in history it will be a defining moment.”

In the future, she declares that her work will not focus on Katrina. “That’s why my last piece in KKProjects is called Swan Song. It will be my last narrative about Katrina.”

DeDeaux sincerely believes that the current bloom of exceptional artistic outcroppings in New Orleans will continue. This, undoubtedly, is a hope of most New Orleaninans. One can be assured that DeDeaux’s next emotionally charged, thought-provoking and intriguing work will live up to our expectations.

While awaiting the completion of her next project, look for Dawn DeDeaux’s works on paper and sculpture at Arthur Roger Gallery, by which she is represented.