The Aldrich presents Andrea Dezsö: Haunted Ridgefield the latest installment of the Museum’s popular Main Street Sculpture Project—featuring folklore, fantasies, and fears. Exhibition on view through December 31, 2011.
Andrea Dezsö, Sometimes In My Dreams I Fly (partial installation view at Rice Gallery, Houston), 2010 Courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco
The Transylvania-born artist’s site-specific exhibition at The Aldrich showcases her skill in traditional, labor intensive, hand-crafted book-making, and will take the form of a diorama, in which a series of cut-out panels will reveal layers of a hallucinatory narrative featuring fantasy worlds and idiosyncratic characters.
Dezsö presents a powerful journey to the interior of the psyche through giant multimedia tunnel books, visible through the windows of the Museum’s historic 1783 administration building on Main Street.
Aldrich curator Mónica Ramírez-Montagut explains, “Dezsö was inspired by Connecticut’s haunted places and their stories; her exhibition will feature strange child-like creatures that populate the bizarre environment of her installation.”
The somewhat surreal setting will present motifs from nature, such as spider webs and creeper plants, which convey a certain level of mystery and danger. These motifs will extend into the building’s architecture, where the artist has created new Victorian-like fretwork for the porch (corbels, gable decorations, and column brackets), with ornaments that are “deadly” beautiful and irresistible.
As Dezsö points out, “It opens on Halloween night, my favorite holiday, because that is the time when we can trespass across the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead.”
Dezsö is Assistant Professor of Art at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. She was full time faculty at Parsons School of Design in New York for nearly a decade and has also taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, City College in New York, the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary, and lectured extensively nationally and internationally. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Arts & Design and the Jack Tilton Gallery, New York; Rice Gallery, Houston; The Fujikawa Kirie Art Museum, Japan; The Cheongjou Craft Biennale, South Korea; and reviewed in ArtForum, ArtNews, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Wall Street Journal, NPR, New York magazine, Print, Fiber Arts and Hand/Eye. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Print, Blab and Esopus. Community Garden, Dezsö’s large-scale public mosaic installed in the New York City subway, was awarded Best American Public Art in 2007 by Americans for the Arts. Her second project for the NYC subway, a 48-panel stainless steel work, will be installed in late 2011.
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877
Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org