Pierogi Gallery Presents Brian Dewan's Latest Humourous Film Strip

Written by Gareth Cheeseman Wednesday, 12 October 2011 02:12

Williamsburg, Brooklyn.- Pierogi is proud to show "Brian Dewan: The Tide Waits for No Man", on view from October 14th through November 13th. This exhibition features a new I-CAN-SEE Film Strip of the same name. Film Strips are a form of projected image—a sequenced slide show—originally used for public school and religious education from the 1920s through the ’70s, and tended to be dryly informative on dull subjects. The image frames are advanced by hand, frame-by-frame with an accompanying narrative. Dewan appropriates this format to create his own extraordinary tales; simultaneously informative, cautionary, deadpan, and hilarious. Dewan creates the drawings, the accompanying story and narration, as well as all music and sound effects. He approaches "The Tide Waits for No Man" as a literal translation of the word tide and the effects of the moon on Earth and us. He puts a whimsical face to this analogy and reminds us that we are not in control even though we may try. Also on view will be a selection of drawings from the Film Strip, all in a painted Dewanian environment. This will be Brian Dewan’s fourth exhibition at Pierogi. His previous I-CAN-SEE Film Strips include Before the White Man Came, Deuteronomy, Grimm’s Tales, Neighbors in the Solar System, The Course of Your Research, The King of Instruments, and The Habit of Innovation, among others. Dewan is an accomplished visual artist, musician, and performer.

Brian Dewan is an artist who works in many media, including art, music, audio-visual performances, decorative painting, furniture design, poetry and musical instrument design. He has produced three albums of songs and concertized extensively as a solo artist, as well as having performed in various collaborations and as a sideman. He lives in upstate New York and is the brother of artist Ted Dewan. Brian Dewan's series of I Can See filmstrips use the technology of the educational filmstrips from the mid-twentieth century as a point of departure for imaginative personal invention. Each panel features one of Dewan's fanciful drawings, usually skillfully rendered in magic marker or watercolor. The images are accompanied by elaborate soundtracks in which Dewan is heard, adopting a deadpan narrator's voice, and playing various musical instruments to create a different miniature soundtrack for each panel of the filmstrip. When it is time for the projectionist to advance the strip to the next panel, Dewan's voice is typically heard singing "boop" in close imitation of the noise traditionally used for this purpose. The themes of the strips often seem as though they could have been taken from actual educational strips - Grimm's Fairy Tales, Civic Pride, a short history of the Organ, Biblical stories have all served as conceits for the filmstrips.


The strips tend to take many free-associative liberties and are by turns satirical and surreal, often whimsical and sometimes touching on serious themes. "Before the White Man Came" seems as though it might be about colonialism or racism, but the "White Man" of the filmstrip starts to seem more likely to be a folkloric evil spirit, with a charged and ambiguous relationship to racial stereotypes. In 2003, Dewan created an installation at the Pierogi 2000 Gallery in Brooklyn which transformed the appearance of the gallery into that of an American classroom from an indeterminate bygone era, perhaps from the 1940s. He presented his filmstrips regularly during the course of the month-long exhibition, to audience members seated in old schooldesks.

Pierogi, founded in 1994 by Joe Amrhein, is an artist-run gallery located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—an area now vital to the larger art community because of its concentration of diverse artists and its innovative gallery scene. Pierogi has monthly solo shows which feature the work of emerging and mid-career artists. The focus is on one-person shows in order to highlight an individual artist’s work. The exhibitions cover an eclectic range of media and style—from the performance installations of Ward Shelley, to the panoramic and filmic drawings of Dawn Clements, as well as curated exhibitions such as the award-winning Dead Tree installation (a recreation of the Robert Smithson piece originally installed in the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, 1969). In February 1999 Pierogi relocated from its original tight quarters to a larger space. There is now a main gallery, an additional smaller gallery, and a separate space for the Flat Files, as well as a video library. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.pierogi2000.com/

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