FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For more information, contact:
Joelle Dietrick
Reichenberger Straße 149
10999 Berlin
Germany
home: +49(30) 70221305
cell: +49 (174) 6481271
jdietrick@gmail.com
http://joelledietrick.com
skype: jdietrick
JOELLE DIETRICK
THE SHERWIN SERIES NOVEMBER 11 - DECEMBER 13, 2010
OPENING RECEPTION
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11TH, 4 - 6 PM
Curfman Gallery, Colorado State University
VISITING LECTURE BY MELINDA BARLOW
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10TH, 5:30 PM
Fine Arts, F101, Colorado State University
The Curfman Gallery at Colorado State University is pleased to present The Sherwin Series, an exhibition of recent work by JOELLE DIETRICK, on view from November 11 through December 13, 2010. A lecture about the work will be given by University of Colorado, Boulder Film Professor Melinda Barlow on November 10 at 5:30p at in Fine Arts, F101. An opening reception will be held in the Curfman Gallery on Thursday, November 11th, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m.
ABOUT THE SERIES
The Sherwin Series is a group of paintings, prints and animations that remix foreclosed homes and Sherwin-Williams 2007 Color Forecast paints. Sherwin-Williams chose the colors during the height of the housing bubble before the foreclosure epidemic began. Dietrick developed the series of paintings in 2010 with the end of the housing crisis not in sight.
Color forecasts have always been inextricably linked to commerce and politics. As Greg Castillo explained in his recent talk at Columbia University’s conference, Architecture and the State: 1940s-1970s, color choices of post-war domestic interior walls and appliances exported overseas to sell the American way of life that were not always well-received. For example, a sunshine yellow kitchen came to embody the clash of civilizations between Soviet consumer austerity and Western consumer excess.
Likewise, Cornell West in the film Examined Life (2008) questions the sustainability of last century’s American prosperity. The subtitle of the series, Rejecting Romanticism, evolved from West’s ideas and foregrounds the psychological impact of a bubble bursting. West suggests that rather than lamenting paradise lost, we “ride the dissonance.” Designed harmonious color palettes filling fragmented structures mirror this updated approach to beauty.
The paintings’ process, acrylic on canvas from computer-generated studies, mimics micro to macroeconomic shifts. The animations behave similarly, using the blur of scraped data from foreclosed home websites to make more memorable visuals resonate. As global trends continue to affect local jobs, contemporary ideas about our relationship to place continue to shift. Reflecting our struggle to maintain identity in the face of tough economic times, the resulting artworks—full of domestic architecture stretching and morphing, adapting to a new era—revisits the American dream to obtain and maintain basic necessities.
EXCERPTS FROM THE CATALOG
From Melinda Barlow’s essay “Embracing Contradiction”
Conceived in Salzburg, created in Florida and Pennsylvania, and animated in Berlin for exhibition in Colorado, the twenty-eight prints and four paintings in The Sherwin Series by Joelle Dietrick attest to an artistic process invigorated by travel, and an abiding concern with the notion of home. Featuring shattered house forms in the harmonious hues of Sherwin- Williams’ 2007 Color Forecast, the roofs, beams, doors, and windows flying skyward in this series evoke a housing market sent into a tailspin by widespread foreclosures, an effect even more striking when the images are set in motion.
Transformed into a restless mass of colored shards held in check by shifting text scrapped from websites listing foreclosed homes by state, and punctuated by the rhythmic scrape of a desktop drive’s degraded media, this “data house cloud,” as Dietrick calls it, is at once a barometer of our current anxiety, and a vision of how to stay afloat.
From Denis Wood’s essay “Balanced Living”
When Leonardo da Vinci wrote – in his notebooks, “Of Representing the Deluge” – “Let the dark and gloomy air be shown battered by the rush of contrary and convoluted winds bearing hither and thither numberless branches and the ruins of mountains collapsing above the rivers and blocking the valley, the pent up rivers bursting forth, the disintegration of the high buildings raising dust that like smoke or wreathed clouds rises through the descending rain,” he did not have in mind the collapse of the housing industry whose waves we’re still struggling to ride these three years later.
Yet it is precisely this face of the collapse – we say the word with so little attention to its figurative implications – that Joelle Dietrick confronts in her Sherwin series, not just the weight of the collapse and the debris cloud invariably raised, but the way the ensuing torrent catches everything up to take it for a ride.
ADDITIONAL LINKS
Webpage with small images: http://joelledietrick.com/site/sherwin
Hi-res images for print: http://joelledietrick.com/_site/content/sherwin/PR-images.zip
Pdf of catalog: http://joelledietrick.com/_site/content/sherwin/sherwin_catalog.pdf
Animation with link to HD Video: http://joelledietrick.com/site/sherwin-animation
Quicker loading video on Vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/15341440
ABOUT JOELLE DIETRICK
Joelle Dietrick is an American artist and DAAD grant recipient based in Berlin, Germany. Her current research into housing extends her interest in our complicated relationship to place. With attention given to ever-evolving divisions between public and private space, she combines digital and traditional art media to echo the fragmentation inherent in contemporary global economic systems. Selected exhibitions of her work include MCA Chicago, MCA San Diego, Long March Space Beijing, ARC Gallery Chicago, Soho20 New York and upcoming installations in Prague and Venice this fall 2010. http://joelledietrick.com
ABOUT MELINDA BARLOW
Melinda Barlow, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she received the Boulder Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award, the Gold Best Should Teach Award, and was the Dean's Senior Honors Teaching Fellow in 2009-10. The editor of Mary Lucier: Art & Performance (JHUP, 2000), Professor Barlow researches the work of contemporary women film and video makers and is currently writing a memoir on film, female identity, and art collecting titled My Museum. http://www.colorado.edu/FilmStudies/faculty/mbarlow.shtml
For further information, please contact the Curfman Gallery at +1.970.491.2810, or email lsc_curfmangallery@mail.colostate.edu.
CURFMAN GALLERY
Lory Student Center
Colorado State University
T 970.491.2810
lsc_curfmangallery@mail.colostate.edu
http://www.curfman.colostate.edu
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