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Queen's Nails Projects is pleased to present, as part of LA ART's Offsite Projects with ForYourArt for the 2008 California Biennial (CB08), a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist DʼNell Larson. Debuting two new video works and a performance in collaboration with Dennis and Arline Larson, Under the Milky Way explores the point at which clichéd imagery and popular culture fuse with personal memory and shape identity. Through her parentsʼ voice, Larson personifies 80ʼs and 90ʼs music icons such as Joy Division, Nirvana, and The Cure as a means to hypostatize their influence and personal import on Larsonʼs youth. The artist revealed of this process:
"It is difficult to differentiate what is clichéd or constructed and what is inherent in oneʼs own emotional response separate from the rest of the world. I donʼt really think it is possible to separate the two; they become infused. This fine line that separates memory and cliché, and how popular forms contribute to the construction of these phenomena is what interests me. Popular forms act as triggers for memory or recollection, and music, for me in particular, serves as a demarcation of a specific moment in time. I guess what I am interested in is how music can create a memory that may or may not have existed without an association of sound."
In Untitled (birds), 2008, hundreds of still images of birds flying over a body of water are edited in a sporadic and repetitive video that pressure the junction where constructed memory and the viewerʼs own emotional response merge. The Echo and the Bunnymenʼs The Killing Moon, sung by the artist, questions further if memory is such through oneʼs own interpretation or if it is derived from popular culture. Dʼnell Larson was born in San Francisco in 1970 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1996. Larsonʼs work has been featured in exhibitions at galleries such as Bodybuilder & Sportsman, Chicago; Sixspace Gallery, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the MU Foundation, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and White Columns, New York.
Special thanks to Mike Bianco, Lydia Hyslop, Dennis and Arline Larson, Julio Cesar Morales, Daniel Pelt, Travis Shettel, and Zach Taylor.
Queen's Nails Projects (formally Queenʼs Nails Annex), located in the Mission district of San Francisco, has built a strong reputation for dedicating its project space to presenting collaborative, site-specific, and experimental artworks.
