May 30 – August 9, 2012

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, Abigail DeVille: Invisible Men underwent constant modifications; the features of this page provided accruing information on the Session’s developments and will continue to track the project’s progression beyond Recess’s walls.

Events

About Abigail DeVille: Invisible Men

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”
— Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason

On May 30, 2012 Abigail DeVille will begin work on Invisible Men, as part of Recess’s signature program, Session. Session invites artists to use Recess’s public space as studio, exhibition venue and grounds for experimentation. For Invisible Men, DeVille will amass bricolage, painting, and sculpture into a selective history of culturally invisible classes of people as a means of reflecting upon the material culture of the present moment.

Deville’s dense installation will be created from the artist’s domestic effects and material she sources from the streets of the South Bronx. The work will take the form of alleyways and subway tunnels that make up the homes of a growing number of New York City’s homeless population. During her time at Recess in Red Hook, DeVille will excavate the psychic terrains of urban spaces, inscribing the invisible remains of history.

DeVille will assemble this compacted history both in and around the studio. Her intention is to create a constellation of impromptu black holes of information that highlight varied forms of historical erasure in New York City.

DeVille’s work constructs environments in which the chaos of excess reveals the impossibility of a consistent narrative. Saturated with images and material in various states of decay, the visual landscape of her projects suggests the unruly nature of history by incorporating everything at hand.

 

About the Artist

Abigail DeVille (born 1981, New York City) received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2007. She received the Camille Hanks Cosby fellowship to participate in the Skowhegan Residency Program in 2007. DeVille was a participant in the art world’s first reality television show, Artstar, which aired on Gallery HD from June 2006 – January 2009 and culminated with an exhibition at Deitch Projects (NY). She has exhibited at The New Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, Vogt Gallery, project spaces Recess, The Bronx River Art Center and Marginal Utility in Philadelphia, PA. DeVille is a 2011 MFA graduate in painting at The Yale School of Art.