Grids Next Door
We are pleased to showcase the visual work of one of our writers, Cindy Hinant. Below is the press release and accompanying images from her recent show at 3A Gallery.
3A Gallery
Exhibition: Cindy Hinant: Grids Next Door
Dates: May 1-29, 2011
Reception: Sunday May 1, 4-6:00 PM
Video Still from Grids Next Door
Photo courtesy of artist
Hinant’s installation is dominated by a reenactment of Dan Flavin’s famous Pink out of a Corner (for Jasper Johns) 1963. Her version Sonja out of a Corner (for Flav) After Pink out of A Corner (to Jasper Johns) 1963 minus Two Feet 2010 examines the sexual politics in Minimalism. Just as Flavin’s piece is a blunt and public assessment of John’s homosexuality, Hinant highlights Flavin’s exploitative relationship with his then wife Sonja.
Minimalism aspired to the perceptual fusion of the industrial object with the neutrality of the exhibition space. Hinant’s romanticism points to a physical degree of difference that refuses to reconcile with Minimalism’s airtight version of the relationship between space and body, in which the spectator is normatized, neutral, and asexual. In Hinant’s world, a precise system generates nuances, specificities, and exceptions. Hinant’s neon leans casually against the wall, and is two feet shorter than Flavin’s original, she leaves the wiring exposed in tribute to Sonja Flavin who constructed all of her husband’s early works.
This logic of differentiation expands to Hinant’s treatment of the grid, a classic modernist compositional device. The grid exhibits control, geometry, uniformity, and order valued by the modern man. It symbolizes progress, industrialization, and conquest over nature. In Hinant’s hand-made renditions of graph paper, mistakes and imperfections dismantle the grid’s utopic aspirations. Similarly, in the video, computer generated grids are submitted to the audio, as they appear to be synched with the babbling of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends, taken from the reality television show Girls Next Door. The result is an intolerable dystopia of banality and singularity.
Girls Next Door portrays a now eighty-something Hefner as a father figure or sugar daddy and his girlfriends are portrayed as young ambitious girls with career-minded goals. The same regularity that makes the grid open and democratic also creates a space that is oppressive and controlling (thus is the paradox within any utopic vision). Similar contradictions can be found within Playboy. The same attributes that attract women to the brand, shifting the gender of its demographics, and to the utopia of the Playboy Mansion also restrict them to an objectified, repressed role. Playboy Enterprises has created a culture of young girls who see The Girls Next Door as role models and the Playboy Bunny icon as cool and subversive.
[photospace]
photos and video courtesy of artist
