On View: February 17 - March 24, 2018
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 17, 2018, 7-9pm
For Dan Tague’s fourth solo exhibition with Civilian Art Projects, the New Orleans-based artist presents “Alternative Evidence”: new painting, photography, and mixed-media works. The exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, February 17 at 7pm, and will be on view until March 24, 2018.
“Compositions: Reinterpreted,” an on-going photography and mixed-media series, represents alternative facts as well as alternative lifestyles. Dollar bills, portraits, and other objects are constructed or re-imagined by the artist to carve out meaning. Referencing the minimalism and protest assemblage of Barbara Kruger, Agnes Martin, and Stuart Davis, Tague’s new works allude to the role of the artist as revolutionary in dark times. He writes, “Artists, intellectuals, books that promote free thinking, are all enemies of the state in fascist regimes.” For example, in the new mixed-media piece Make America Great Again, Sharpie phrases of media/Trump buzzwords adorn tightly stacked yellow #2 pencils in homage to a stack of National Geographic magazines. Vacuous words and phrases like “fake news”, “bigly”, “libtard,” and “total loser” replace story titles as a proposed year in review of the American republic.
“Wild Beast” is a new series of abstract paintings, melding politics and aesthetics through the abstraction of early punk and hardcore albums. According to the artist, “I always admired Matisse’s drive to create, which persisted until death halted it. As a punk rock skateboarding teen, I felt the same angst as many of my generation. The angst stemming from purpose and conflicts with authority. As I grew to admire his later ‘Jazz’ collages, I grew more resolute in my beliefs, firmed by countless lessons from hours and hours of political music directed at social change and non-conformity. The strange fruits produced by this unlikely marriage yield not a conflict of ideology, but a strange calm in the midst of a seemingly unraveling world.”
Dan Tague’s art has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and has been used in conjunction with The Spirit Initiative, The Clinton Bush Fund for Haiti, Help USA, and Teach for America. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, the Weisman Foundation, and many private collections. He received an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of New Orleans in 2000.
