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Indepth Arts News:
"Gymnosphore Bubbles and Steams: An Installation by David Deany and David Hanson"
2001-03-31 until 2001-04-28
Side Street Projects
Los Angeles, CA,
USA United States of America
Gymnosophore, an art installation featuring functional hot tubs built by
artists David Deany and David Hanson. The Gymnosophore space
will host a limited number of parties including the opening reception on
March 31 from 7-9pm. In addition to the tubs, the installation includes
various paintings, sculptures, and videos.
David Deany, painter and sculptor, has a conceptual bent and a predilection
for environment making. After receiving an MFA from the Art Institute of
Chicago in 1997, he has been included in exhibitions in Chicago, Los
Angeles, Seattle, and Houston, including a one person show in which he
transformed a gallery into a functioning bed and breakfast, acting as
artist and host. His paintings range from tactile, sculptural abstractions
to romantic oils and quirky goaches and his sculptures often engage the
rhetorical as well as the absurd.
David Hanson is a sculptor with a history of grandiose performative work
and concept-oriented event engineering. While receiving his BFA at the
Rhode Island School of Design, he gained media notoriety for his
transformation of a campus sculpture and hillside into a slimy vagiphallic
slosh pit. Noted founder of the infamous Disturbathon, an annual
bacchanalia held in Dallas, Texas, Hansons performances, videos, events,
paintings, and sculptures all exhibit a sensibility of serious hedonism.
Referencing Southern Californias strong history with the party
architecture of the spa, Gymnosophore is an abstract hot tub fantasy, a
carnivalesque play-space, and a psychoactive performance/experience as well
as a visual essay on hot tubs and hot tub culture.
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Historically, the hot tub was more than just an appliance of leisure.
Ancient Hindu traditions utilized the hot tub as a central icon in
religious ceremonies. The gymnasiums of ancient Greece iconized the hot
tub as the site of important philosophical dialogues. Following these
traditions, this collaborative exhibition uses the tub environment to
introduce the concept of the party as a theatrical art form. Gymnosophore
proposes to engage on the material level of the earth and body as well as
the ineffable planes of the mysterious and abstract, at turns both
contemplative and asinine.
The word Gymnosophore is a contraction of the words Gymnos (Greek for
naked), sophos (Greek for wisdom), and -more (derived from moros,
Greek for puerile, as in the word sophomore). Hence, the Gymnosophore
intends to incubate sophisticated hedonistic ritual, as well as dedicated
foolishness, all set to the squirming steamy mojo of our tubs.
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