Our Amazing Brutalities
Thorsten Dennerline
September 9, 2003 - October 12, 2003
This installation includes 200 small drawings and 150 small prints of pinned insects. The main room also features a set of hand made boxes that contain insects and insect parts attached to drawings. "Our Amazing Brutality" refers to human nature in general and to current US policies in particular.
The local news broadcast, the most common source of "news" information became my focus. Pssst. Hey Kid ·examines this relationship among the viewer, network and advertiser as it relates to a specific type of information exchange. I became particularly interested in the interplay of the news segments and the commercials that separated them.
The idea of a set of small portable drawings came to me while working on a Fulbright grant in Chile. I used a few of them in an installation at a former prison in the city of Valparaiso. The drawings were placed on huge black shadowy images of ferocious dogs painted on the wall. The small drawings within the larger paintings invited the viewer to slow down and take a closer look at things. Of course, there was also an element of criticism of how "high-speed" our lives have become. The small and portable nature of the drawings also reflects an interest in the metaphoric journey of making art. These ideas of higher awareness and "the journey" were inspired by the work of Vicente Huidobro, a Chilean poet I was studying at the time.
Here in Saint Louis, I decided to begin work on a much larger collection of these small drawings to eventually use as a wall hanging. However, as I worked on these images, I found myself recording my thoughts on the horrific changes that were occurring at home and abroad. 'Small' also became the small voice, the unheard opinion about war, invasion, and regime change. The smallness of the images began to reflect my feeling of isolation. The elements of irony and social criticism in my work now applied specifically to American policies of war abroad and the threat to civil liberties at home.
A plane may connote a metaphorical journey, but it can also be an instrument of destruction. Small drawings may refer to the details of everyday life but taken together, they are chaos. The images may be dominated by the brutality of pinned insects, but they are punctuated by poetry and humor. "
-Thorsten Dennerline
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