The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Eve Fowler
DCA, Dundee, June 9 – August 26
“Everybody gets so much information all day that they end up losing their common sense” was the prescient statement from American modernist poet Gertrude Stein, long before the 21st Century age of information.
Artist Eve Fowler hopes to recapture the power of Stein’s words for contemporary audiences in her first major European exhibition which opens at the DCA on Saturday, June 9.
Fowler, who has predominantly exhibited in her native US, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, has been working closely with Stein’s poetry for almost a decade and her exhibition uses “art and language to disrupt and unsettle the dominant power structures that control much of the world around us”.
The multi-media display will present Stein’s words in a series of prints, posters, paintings, installations, billboards and film.
Gallery 1 will house the artist’s latest film depicting some of her closest friends in the LA arts community, working in their studios whilst reciting some of Stein’s work in voice overs.
Gallery 2, meanwhile, will contain a varied range of work using paint, vinyl, neon and collage in an effort to embody what Fowler feels is the “experimental, original and somehow coded” nature of Stein’s language.
While the exhibition will contain much of Fowler’s well-known and impactful posters, a collage inspired by Fowler’s residency in Hospitalfield Arts, Arbroath, will also be premiered.
The trademark printed poems will not just be confined to DCA’S galleries, but will also appear in Dundee’s urban spaces throughout the city, where examples of Fowler’s work and new interpretations of Stein’s poetry will be visible. These bold images, made specifically for the city, will replace the usual advertising and notices in the city.
Eoin Dara, Head of Exhibitions at DCA, said: “We are consuming words and information in such an accelerated manner that language can become meaningless…eve’s work offers up a space to pause and consider the power that we can still wield with language.”
As an extended part of the exhibition, Eve, who has worked with writers on two photography books, has teamed with prominent female writers and poets Sophie Collins, Eileen Myles and Letita Petra and the DCA to produce a book for the exhibition. Each writer has written a response to the artist’s work.
The exhibition will offer visitors the chance to celebrate and reflect on the merging of art, poetry and language. Throughout the run, DCA’S events calendar will be filled with activities for all to enjoy, including film screenings, talks and poetry readings.
www.dca.org.uk