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PRESS RELEASE
Mel Ziegler
Hold Your Breath
April 9 through May 17, 2004
Dunn and Brown Contemporary is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Mel Ziegler. The opening of the exhibition will take place on Friday, April 9, 2004 from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. The artist will be present for the opening, and the exhibition will continue through Saturday, May 17, 2004.
Upon entering the gallery space, the viewer encounters over thirty elaborately detailed balloon hats attached to the walls, bobbing and swaying with every passerby. This fanciful visual assault is one you might expect to find at a child’s birthday party where color and light are the order of the day. In fact, Ziegler created these works with the assistance of Bobby Cordell, a talented balloon artist. The sense of innocence and whimsey inherent in these bright and bubbly animated balloon objects sharply contrasts with the sites where Ziegler collected the air samples used to inflate these "air filled" art works.
For Hold Your Breath, Ziegler used a reverse compressor to collect symbolic air samples from important historic sites around the state of Texas. The sites were selected based upon their mythological value. Although the airy creations on display suggest nothing of the state’s dark history, all of the collection sites play into Texas lore as it relates to violence and death. The collection locations include: Palo Duro Canyon, site of the Southern Plains Indians’ last effort at military resistance against the encroachment of the United States Cavalry; Gainesville, site of the great hanging of forty suspected Unionists in Confederate Texas; Cherokee County, site of the Killough massacre, the largest single Indian depredation in East Texas; Fort Parker, site of an attack on settlers and a kidnaping by Caddo and Comanche Indians; San Jacinto, where the battle for Texas independence was actually won; Goliad, site of the Goliad Massacre which was crucial in turning public opinion against Santa Anna in Texas’ fight for independence; the Alamo, site of the most famous of the battles for Texas independence; and the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, the state’s first enclosed penitentiary and site of over 600 executions to date.
Until it is transferred into the balloons, the collected air resides in a compressor. The main compressor, a bright blue giant with the names of each site hand painted on the side in bold white lettering, becomes a sculpture in the exhibition replete with a pink granite base made from the same stone used to build the Texas State Capital Building. Smaller compressors in the same arresting shade of blue contain samples from the individual sites and are labeled accordingly. The balloons will naturally deflate over the course of the exhibition transferring their air to exhibition participants and eventually morphing into less recognizable shapes.
Seeking Sponsorship, another Ziegler work on view, is displayed in the Project Gallery. The exhibition consists of a video projection of Ziegler’s web-site, www.melziegler.com. The site lists various "sculptural events" Ziegler will produce with the assistance of sponsorship. These temporal pieces include a project called Monumental Glow, which consists of a 40' flatbed trailer covered in white flourescent lights. The trailer and lights will be parked at significant historic landscapes around Texas of which there will be approximately six locations. The first of these will be Palo Duro Canyon. Another project, Up and Down consists simply of the artist being picked up and put down by a construction crane illustrating the misguided view of people as commodities that can be transferred easily from place to place.
A native of Pennsylvania, Ziegler currently lives in Austin, Texas and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. His work can be found in permanent collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Wadsworth Anthaneum Museum of Art among others.
Please contact Elizabeth Phy at the gallery for additional information or to request visuals. Dunn and Brown Contemporary is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 until 5:00 and by appointment.